Count items in a folder with PowerShell
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 | mo).Count;
and in PowerShell 4.0 use the measure
alias instead of mo
Write-Host (dir c:\MyFolder | measure).Count;
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;
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