Get full path of the files in PowerShell

I need to get all the files including the files present in the subfolders that belong to a particular type.

I am doing something like this, using Get-ChildItem:

Get-ChildItem "C:\windows\System32" -Recurse | where {$_.extension -eq ".txt"} 

However, it's only returning me the files names and not the entire path.

15 Answers

Add | select FullName to the end of your line above. If you need to actually do something with that afterwards, you might have to pipe it into a foreach loop, like so:

get-childitem "C:\windows\System32" -recurse | where {$_.extension -eq ".txt"} | % { Write-Host $_.FullName } 

This should perform much faster than using late filtering:

Get-ChildItem C:\WINDOWS\System32 -Filter *.txt -Recurse | % { $_.FullName } 

You can also use Select-Object like so:

Get-ChildItem "C:\WINDOWS\System32" *.txt -Recurse | Select-Object FullName 

Here's a shorter one:

(Get-ChildItem C:\MYDIRECTORY -Recurse).fullname > filename.txt 

If relative paths are what you want you can just use the -Name flag.

Get-ChildItem "C:\windows\System32" -Recurse -Filter *.txt -Name

Try this:

Get-ChildItem C:\windows\System32 -Include *.txt -Recurse | select -ExpandProperty FullName 

Get-ChildItem -Recurse *.txt | Format-Table FullName 

That is what I used. I feel it is more understandable as it doesn't contain any loop syntax.

Really annoying thing in PS 5, where $_ won't be the full path within foreach. These are the string versions of FileInfo and DirectoryInfo objects. For some reason a wildcard in the path fixes it, or use Powershell 6 or 7. You can also pipe to get-item in the middle.

Get-ChildItem -path C:\WINDOWS\System32\*.txt -Recurse | foreach { "$_" } Get-ChildItem -path C:\WINDOWS\System32 -Recurse | get-item | foreach { "$_" } 

This seems to have been an issue with .Net that got resolved in .Net Core (Powershell 7): Stringification behavior of FileInfo / Directory instances has changed since v6.0.2 #7132

This worked for me, and produces a list of names:

$Thisfile=(get-childitem -path 10* -include '*.JPG' -recurse).fullname 

I found it by using get-member -membertype properties, an incredibly useful command. most of the options it gives you are appended with a .<thing>, like fullname is here. You can stick the same command;

 | get-member -membertype properties 

at the end of any command to get more information on the things you can do with them and how to access those:

get-childitem -path 10* -include '*.JPG' -recurse | get-member -membertype properties 

I used this line command to search ".xlm" files in "C:\Temp" and the result print fullname path in file "result.txt":

(Get-ChildItem "C:\Temp" -Recurse | where {$_.extension -eq ".xml"} ).fullname > result.txt 

In my tests, this syntax works beautiful for me.

gci "C:\WINDOWS\System32" -r -include .txt | select fullname 

Why has nobody used the foreach loop yet? A pro here is that you can easily name your variable:

# Note that I'm pretty explicit here. This would work as well as the line after: # Get-ChildItem -Recurse C:\windows\System32\*.txt $fileList = Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Path C:\windows\System32 -Include *.txt foreach ($textfile in $fileList) { # This includes the filename ;) $filePath = $textfile.fullname # You can replace the next line with whatever you want to. Write-Output $filePath } 

[alternative syntax]

For some people, directional pipe operators are not their taste, but they rather prefer chaining. See some interesting opinions on this topic shared in roslyn issue tracker: dotnet/roslyn#5445.

Based on the case and the context, one of this approach can be considered implicit (or indirect). For example, in this case using pipe against enumerable requires special token $_ (aka PowerShell's "THIS" token) might appear distasteful to some.

For such fellas, here is a more concise, straight-forward way of doing it with dot chaining:

(gci . -re -fi *.txt).FullName 

(<rant> Note that PowerShell's command arguments parser accepts the partial parameter names. So in addition to -recursive; -recursiv, -recursi, -recurs, -recur, -recu, -rec and -re are accepted, but unfortunately not -r .. which is the only correct choice that makes sense with single - character (if we go by POSIXy UNIXy conventions)! </rant>)

I am using below script to extact all folder path:

Get-ChildItem -path "C:\" -Recurse -Directory -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Select-Object FullName | Out-File "Folder_List.csv" 

Full folder path is not coming. After 113 characters, is coming:

Example - C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\DeviceMetadataCache\dmrccache\en-US\ec4d5fdd-aa12-400f-83e2-7b0ea6023eb7\Windows... 

I had an issue where I had an executable file which had directory path strings as parameters and the format. Like this:

"C:\temp\executable.exe" "C:\storage\filename" "C:\storage\dump" -jpg

I needed to execute this command across terabytes of .jpg files in different folders.

$files = Get-ChildItem -Path C:\storage\*.jpg -Recurse -Force | Select-Object -ExpandProperty FullName for ($i=0; $i -lt $files.Count; $i++) { [string]$outfile = $files[$i] Start-Process -NoNewWindow -FilePath "C:\temp\executable.exe" -ArgumentList $outfile, "C:\storage\dump", "-dcm" }