PowerShell Newbie Question

[mido_939348 Participant Topics: 3 Replies: 5 Points: 33Rank: Member]

Dear All,

Excuse my lack of experience. I am trying to generate a text file that includes all files that end with ‘*.txt’ from the whole HARD-DRIVE, using Mac

my command looks like the following:

Get-ChildItem -Path “./” -Recurse -Name -Include ‘*.txt’ | Out-File “./Desktop/JUNK/HD-Files.txt”

It works very well and very fast but my problem is the ‘-recurse’ commant which doesn’t stop on my terminal I always end up stopping the command myself.

Anybody knows how I can solve that on the command-line itself?

 

I would appreciate the help!

 

Regards,

Mido

[Rob Simmers Participant Topics: 12 Replies: 1623 Points: 2,565Rank: Community Hero]

Recursion is going to look for files in every directory at every depth, so when you say it doesn’t stop, what exactly does that mean? 10 minutes, 2 hours? Are you seeing a file created with the file information?

The only thing that I would recommend is that you create a csv rather than a text file. Powershell will return an object, which is more of a table.

Get-ChildItem -Path “./” -Recurse -Name -Include ‘*.txt’ | Export-CSV “./Desktop/JUNK/HD-Files.csv” -NoTypeInformation

[Olaf Participant Topics: 4 Replies: 2249 Points: 5,494Rank: Community MVP]

Hmmm … I do not have a Mac so I’m not able to reproduce but you might elaborate a little more what’s your problem.

If you start Get-ChildItem in the root and tell it to -Recurse it will only stop if it has searched each and evetry single folder on the drive. It might just take a little longer … did you try to wait a little longer?

[mido_939348 Participant Topics: 3 Replies: 5 Points: 33Rank: Member]

Olaf wrote:

Hmmm … I do not have a Mac so I’m not able to reproduce but you might elaborate a little more what’s your problem.

If you start Get-ChildItem in the root and tell it to -Recurse it will only stop if it has searched each and evetry single folder on the drive. It might just take a little longer … did you try to wait a little longer?

Rob Simmers wrote:

Recursion is going to look for files in every directory at every depth, so when you say it doesn’t stop, what exactly does that mean? 10 minutes, 2 hours? Are you seeing a file created with the file information?

The only thing that I would recommend is that you create a csv rather than a text file. Powershell will return an object, which is more of a table.

<textarea class=”ace_text-input” style=”opacity: 0; height: 18px; width: 7.2246875px; left: 45px; top: 0px;” spellcheck=”false” wrap=”off”></textarea>

1

2

Get-ChildItem –Path “./” –Recurse –Name –Include ‘*.txt’ | Export-CSV “./Desktop/JUNK/HD-Files.csv” –NoTypeInformation

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

I appreciate your reply! Indeed I got used to PS being fast even with large data, which is why I haven’t given it enough time apparently. But now after you suggested to do that, it actually worked and it stopped by itself.

 

Thank you very much!

Regards,

Mohamed.

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