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Schneider
Asked: 2009-06-01 05:03:04 +0800 CST

Find files across all drives using Powershell

  • 772

I know how to search for files using dir/gci, but that only works across one drive AFAIK.

  • Is there a way to search across all drives on the computer?
  • Is there a way without manually enumerating then looping through the drives?
  • Is there a way to access the search indexes/services that are already available in windows, to speed up the search?
powershell

2 Answers

  1. This will list all ZIP files in decending size order by directory on all available drives:

    get-psdrive -p "FileSystem" `
| % {write-host -f Green "Searching " $_.Root;get-childitem $_.Root -include *.ZIP -r `
| sort-object Length -descending}

    Or search a specified list of Drives/Shares (e.g. C:, D: and \SERVER1\SHARE1...)

    $paths="C:\","D:\","\\SERVER1\SHARE1" `
| % {write-host -f Green "Searching " $_;get-childitem $_ -include *.ZIP -r `
| sort-object Length -descending}
    • 3 
  2. $drive = get-psdrive
foreach ($a in $drive) {gci}

    Not so bad... I can't think of a way without recursing all the drives like this, though.

    See this page for info on searching the index.

    • 2