PS Script to print directory names if file type in it

Question

I am looking for a PS script that checks for a certain file type(.err) in a folder's sub-folders (depth -1) and if it finds at least one file with the required file type, prints only the sub-folder's name, without file patch or file name, e.g.:

[root folder]
[subfolder1]-has .err in it
[subfolder2]-doesn't have .err in it
[subfolder3]-doesn't have .err in it
[subfolder4]-has .err in it
[subfolder5]-has .err in it

Output:

[subfolder1]
[subfolder4]
[subfolder5]

I'm not good at PowerShell, so I only found how to list subfolder names which has .err files in it as many times as it has files inside.

(Get-ChildItem -Path C:\root -Depth 1 -recurse -filter *.err).DirectoryName | echo

Karthick Ganesan · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-11T17:15:38.233

1

Okay, after direction from @mklement0 my suggestion would be,

(Get-ChildItem (C:\root + "\*\*") -Filter "*.err").Directory.Name | select -Unique

edited Aug 11 '19 at 17:15

answered Aug 11 '19 at 13:22

Karthick Ganesan

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4
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1

Thank you. It's a quibble, because the performance difference probably won't matter here, but as a general point of interest: `Get-Unique` assumes pre-sorted input (or at least duplicates to be _grouped_, as in this case), which allows it to be much faster than `Select-Object -Unique`, which has to look at the entire input collection. Thus, along with pulling the `-Filter` argument into the wildcard path, I think the best formulation is ultimately: `(Get-ChildItem "C:\root\*\*.err").Directory.Name | Get-Unique` – mklement0 Aug 11 '19 at 17:39

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 11 '19 at 10:13

If I understand the question properly, this should do what you want:

Get-ChildItem -Path 'C:\Root' -Depth 1 -Recurse -Filter *.err -File | 
    Group-Object -Property DirectoryName | 
    ForEach-Object { ($_.Name -split '\\')[-1] }

It searches 1 level deep through the subfolders and if it finds files with extension .err (no matter how many files are in that folder), it outputs the subfolder name only once.

^{If you are on PowerShell version below 3.0, change the top line into

Get-ChildItem -Path 'C:\Root' -Depth 1 -Recurse -Filter *.err |
Where-Object { !$_.PSIsContainer } |}

mklement0 · Answer 3 · 2022-03-10T23:22:34.253

Update: Karthick Ganesan's answer is the simplest approach.

Try the following:

(Get-ChildItem -Depth 1 -Filter *.err).Directory.Name | Get-Unique | Select -Skip 1

^{For brevity, I've omitted the -Path argument and also the -File switch that limits matching to files, as it's fair to assume that you won't have any directories named *.err.}

The use of -Depth implies the use of -Recurse, so the latter needn't be specified.
.Directory.Name outputs the matching files' directory names as an array (via member-access enumeration, PSv3+).
Get-Unique weeds out duplicates, which is necessary, because a given directory will be output multiple times if it contains multiple *.err files.
Select -Skip 1 (Select is a built-in alias for Select-Object) skips the first output object, because it represents the input directory itself (depth 0).

PS Script to print directory names if file type in it

3 Answers3