CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powershell-2.0
HydroPowerDeveloper
HydroPowerDeveloper

Reputation: 3497

Powershell: Count items in a folder with PowerShell

I'm trying to write a very simple PowerShell script to give me the total number of items (both files and folders) in a given folder (c:\MyFolder). Here's what I've done:

Write-Host ( Get-ChildItem c:\MyFolder ).Count;

The problem is, that if I have 1 or 0 items, the command does not work---it returns nothing.

Any ideas?

Upvotes: 138

Views: 290800

Answers (8)

Stanley De Boer
Stanley De Boer

Reputation: 5241

You should use Measure-Object to count things. In this case it would look like:

Write-Host ( Get-ChildItem c:\MyFolder | Measure-Object ).Count;

or if that's too long

Write-Host ( dir c:\MyFolder | measure).Count;

and in PowerShell 4.0 use the measure alias instead of mo

Write-Host (dir c:\MyFolder | measure).Count;

Upvotes: 217

Daniel Rodas
Daniel Rodas

Reputation: 141

You can also use an alias

(ls).Count

Upvotes: 12

OrigamiEye
OrigamiEye

Reputation: 1035

To count the number of a specific filetype in a folder. The example is to count mp3 files on F: drive. 

( Get-ChildItme F: -Filter *.mp3 - Recurse | measure ).Count

Tested in 6.2.3, but should work >4.

Upvotes: 1

Fábio Rodrigues Fonseca
Fábio Rodrigues Fonseca

Reputation: 1526

In powershell you can to use severals commands, for looking for this commands digit: Get-Alias;

So the cammands the can to use are:

write-host (ls MydirectoryName).Count

or

write-host (dir MydirectoryName).Count

or

write-host (Get-ChildrenItem MydirectoryName).Count

Upvotes: 1

Valeriy Glushenkov
Valeriy Glushenkov

Reputation: 124

Recursively count files in directories in PowerShell 2.0

ls -rec | ? {$_.mode -match 'd'} | select FullName,  @{N='Count';E={(ls $_.FullName | measure).Count}}

Upvotes: 4

hdev
hdev

Reputation: 6507

Only Files

Get-ChildItem D:\ -Recurse -File | Measure-Object | %{$_.Count}

Only Folders

Get-ChildItem D:\ -Recurse -Directory | Measure-Object | %{$_.Count}

Both

Get-ChildItem D:\ -Recurse | Measure-Object | %{$_.Count}

Upvotes: 20

dariusw
dariusw

Reputation: 521

If you need to speed up the process (for example counting 30k or more files) then I would go with something like this..

$filepath = "c:\MyFolder"
$filetype = "*.txt"
$file_count = [System.IO.Directory]::GetFiles("$filepath", "$filetype").Count

Upvotes: 52

HydroPowerDeveloper
HydroPowerDeveloper

Reputation: 3497

I finally found this link:

https://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2011/06/powershell-count-property-returns-nothing/

Well, it turns out that this is a quirk caused precisely because there was only one file in the directory. Some searching revealed that in this case, PowerShell returns a scalar object instead of an array. This object doesn’t have a count property, so there isn’t anything to retrieve.

The solution -- force PowerShell to return an array with the @ symbol:

Write-Host @( Get-ChildItem c:\MyFolder ).Count;

Upvotes: 49

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