Get-ChildItem is very useful cmdlet provided by Powershell. This cmdlet has two main usages. One is if the directory is provided as a parameter the given directory files and folders will be enumerated like a loop. Second is if a list or container is provided all the child will we enumerated.  Let’s start action to learn details.

Syntax

Syntax is like below.

Get-ChildItem OPTIONS PATH

• OPTIONS used for different behaviors
• PATH is used to specify path without any option.

Help

We can print help information about Get-ChildItem cmdlet like below. We will use Get-Help cmdlet to print help information about Get-ChildItem.

PS> Get-Help Get-ChildItem

List All Files And Folders In Current Directory

We will start with a simple example where we do not provide any option to the Get-ChildItem cmdlet. This will print all files and folders in the current working directory.

PS> Get-ChildItem

We can see that the following information is provided.

• Mode like read, write execute
• LastWriteTime
• Length which specifies the size
• Name

Shown Only Given Extension

In this example, we will only show files with the specific extension. We can provide the extension after the cmdlet. In this case, we will list System file extension which can be specified as *.sys like below.

PS> Get-ChildItem *.sys

We can also use -Path option we can also provide the extension like below.

PS> Get-ChildItem -Path *.sys

Specify Path

The default behavior of the Get-ChildItem is running on the current working directory. If we want to run this cmdlet in the different path we can specify the path with the -Path option. In this example, we will run on the Windows directory in the C: partition like below. Using double quotes will make the path specification more stable because spaces in the path may create problems.

PS> Get-ChildItem -Path "c:\Windows"

List Recursively

The default behavior is listing current working directory or path to list. If we want to list the subfiles and subfolders we need to make the listing in a recursive manner. We can enable recursion with the -Recurse option like below.

PS> Get-ChildItem -Recurse

We can see that there are some errors printed in red because we do not have access to this path.

Specify Recursion Depth

By specifying recursion we will let the Get-ChildItem command list all subfiles and subfolders.  This means recursive list will go to the 100 level if it exists.  This may create some performance or output problems. We can limit the depth of recursive listing with the  -Depth option. We will provide the level as a number like 5. In this example, we will only list depth with 1 like below.

PS> Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Depth 2

Exclude Some Files

While listing we may need to exclude some files according to their names or extensions. We will use -Exclude option and provide the file or folder name. In this example, we will exclude according to their extension where will exclude files with *.sys extension.

PS> Get-ChildItem -Exclude "*.sys"

Include Files and Extension

While excluding some files according to their names and extensions we can also include some file names and extensions with the -Include option. In this example we will exclude *.tmp extension but include files with name check even their extension is *.tmp.

PS> Get-ChildItem -Exclude "*.tmp" -Include "*check*"

List All Registry Key

Get-ChildItem cmdlet can work with the registry by using HKLM to the -Path option. We can list all registry keys like below. We will search in Software hive in this example.

PS> Get-ChildItem -Path HKLM:\Software

List All Certificates

Another useful feature of the Get-ChildItem cmdlet is listing currently installed and used certificates. We will use -Path with the Cert parameter like below.

PS> Get-ChildItem -Path Cert:\

List Only Name of The Files and Folders

The default behavior of the Get-ChildItem cmdlet is listing files names with other attributes like size, mode etc. If we just want to list the names of the files we need to provide -Name option like below.

PS> Get-ChildItem -Name