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Manage Local Filesystems with PowerShell

PowerShell is an excellent language to automate file system operations. Because the language is verbose, it is easy for engineers to read other people's code and understand what it's doing. Since PowerShell is built on .NET Core, it's easy to automate filesystems on major operating systems, including Windows, MacOS, and various Linux distributions.

Some common filesystem operations you might need to perform include:

  • Creating a new directory
  • Deleting a directory tree
  • Delete one or more files
  • Create a new text or binary file

In the following sections, we'll explore how you can accomplish some of these common tasks. Remember that PowerShell generally provides multiple approaches to performing any given task, so these examples just provide one approach.

List Files & Directories​

One of the most simple file system operations is to list files and directories, underneath a given directory path. PowerShell also provides a $HOME variable that consistently points to a user's home directory, across different platforms.

Get-ChildItem -Path $HOME

You can also use this command to limit results to just directories or just files.

# List directories only
Get-ChildItem -Path $HOME -Directory

# List files only
Get-ChildItem -Path $HOME -File

Delete File​

One of the built-in PowerShell commands allows you to delete files from the local file system. This command is called Remove-Item. You can specify one or more file paths that you want to delete. Use commas to delimit multiple file paths that you want to delete.

Remove-Item -Path file01.txt
Remove-Item -Path $HOME/file02.txt, /file03.txt

Delete Directory​

The same command that's used to delete files can also delete directories, along with all of their contents. However, because directories can contain multiple items, you must affirmatively tell PowerShell to delete all recursive items. The -Recurse parameter indicates to PowerShell that you want to delete everything inside the directory, along with the directory itself. Using the -Force parameter prevents any interactive confirmation prompt from showing up.

Remove-Item -Path $HOME/testdir -Recurse -Force

Create Text or Binary File​

You can create a new text file with a single PowerShell command, while setting the contents of the file simultaneously. The Set-Content command allows you to write data into a file.

Set-Content -Path $HOME/file01.txt -Value 'Trevor Sullivan'

If you want to write raw bytes into a file, you can use the -AsByteStream paramter for Set-Content. The command below creates an array of individual byte values, and pipes it into the -Value parameter of the Set-Content command.

[Byte[]]@(50, 100, 150, 120, 125, 153) | Set-Content -Path $HOME/file01.bin -AsByteStream