Hi All,
I have been trying to write a powershell script for nearly a week now that lists all the folders recursively from c:\ and excludes "C:\Documents and Settings" and all of it's sub folders.

My colleagues and I have been trying many different approches to this like this:

foreach ($file in $(Get-ChildItem c:\ -Recurse | where { $_.PSIsContainer -and $_.Name -ne 'Documents and Settings' } | gci))
{
$file.fullname
}


but each time we run it, it displays Documents and Settings each time anyway, even though we have excluded it.
Obviously, -exclude would have been ideal if it worked in PS v2, but the help file accurately indicates that it does not work properly in this cmdlet.

The final result is that we would use this script as the basis to set permissions on all folders that it returned, and therefore would not impact any folders in C:\Documents and Settings.
Any help would be appreciated.

Try this:

Get-ChildItem c:\ -Recurse | where { $_.PSIsContainer -AND $_.FullName -notmatch '^C:\\Documents and Settings'} | ft fullname

Thanks very much Shay, that looks really good.  So much easier than what I was thinking I had to do.  I love how simple PowerShell can be... Just wish I knew how to do it.

Thanks you for the post, sjc073>hi



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Sorry to drag this thread back from the depths, but there's one thing I'm still confused about....

I noticed Shay suggested '^C:\\Documents and Settings' as the match criteria, and I didn't follow the logic.

I tried what I would have used: -notmatch "C:\Documents and Settings".
That did not work.

But adding another \ to the C:\ does work (ie. "C:\\Documents and Settings") DOES work.

What's going on here? Does single quotes matter? Is the ^ some sort of regular expression indicator? Why dual slashes?

Any help appreciated.

in RegEx \ is an escape character. So, it must be preceeded by another \ to search for the actual slash.

^ indicates the search must start at the beginning of the string.

Great RegEx/PoSh reference:
http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/eboo...sions.aspx

OK, that makes sense - at least as much sense as Regex usually do, but is there an advantage of using a Regex at all in this case, as opposed to the literal value?

anytime you use the -match/-replace operators you are using regex by default. It's just the way PoSh was written. The advantage is that regex is a standard and very powerful.

Ahh, OK - cool, didn'trealize that. Thanks!