Include unc path in file size output from powershell

Question

I'm very new to powershell. I have a txt file with a subset of UNC paths to directories that i need to determine the size of each of them. I've come up with the following which is working as intended but i have a couple of problems.

FUNCTION FileSize
{$DB = Get-Content 'C:\path\path\path\path\paths2.txt'
foreach ($Data in $DB) 
{"{0:N2} GB" -f ((Get-ChildItem "$Data" -Recurse | Measure-Object -Property Length -Sum -ErrorAction Stop).Sum / 1GB)}}

I need to add into this the ability to see the UNC path that the size reading belongs too and f i could also output the results to a txt file that would beneficial too. All attempts so far have been futile.

Thanks, Allan

mklement0 · Answer 1 · 2018-06-26T16:18:56.037

BenH's helpful answer provides an effective solution that performs the output formatting directly inside the FileSize function.

Alternatively, for more flexibility, consider refactoring your approach so as to separate the aspects of data gathering and output formatting:

First, modify your function:

to accept the file containing the target paths as a parameter
to output custom objects that have a .Path property containing the file path at hand, .Size property containing the aggregate size as a number (type [double].

Function FileSize {
  param(
    [string] $PathsFile
  )
  foreach ($path in Get-Content $PathsFile) {
    [pscustomobject] @{
      Path = $path
      Size = (Get-ChildItem -File $path -Recurse | Measure-Object -Property Length -Sum -ErrorAction Stop).Sum
    }
  }
}

The data-only output of the function then lets you decide later how to format the data and where to save it:

Using BenH's approach in a ForEach-Object call:

 FileSize 'C:\path\path\path\path\paths2.txt' |
   ForEach-Object { '{0} : {1:N2} GB' -f $_.Path, ($_.Size/1GB) }

You can simply append > out.txt, for instance, to save the output in a file; alternatively, piping to Out-File or Set-Content allows you to control the output file's character encoding with the -Encoding parameter.

To produce friendly tabular output for display, you can pipe to Format-Table using a calculated property:

 FileSize 'C:\path\path\path\path\paths2.txt' |
   Format-Table Path, @{ n='Size'; e={ '{0:N2} GB' -f ($_.Size/1GB) } }

Finally, for further programmatic processing, you can pipe FileSize output to export cmdlets such as Export-Csv and Export-CliXml or even conversion cmdlets such as ConvertTo-Json.

@phemor: I've rewritten the answer to focus more on the separation of data and formatting, so I'm no longer using `Select-Object`. While I still have no explanation for your symptom, I suspect the new solution will make it go away. — mklement0, Jun 26 '18 at 16:27

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 20 '18 at 20:06

It appears that you have the UNC path information stored in $Data, so you could add it in front of your output string. The save the output of the whole loop in a variable and you can export it by piping to Out-File, Add-Content, or Set-Content.

function FileSize {
    $DB = Get-Content 'C:\path\path\path\path\paths2.txt'
    $Sizes = foreach ($Data in $DB) {
        "$Data : {0:N2} GB" -f ((Get-ChildItem "$Data" -Recurse | Measure-Object -Property Length -Sum -ErrorAction Stop).Sum / 1GB)
    }
    $Sizes | Out-File 'C:\path\path\path\path\out.txt'
}

Include unc path in file size output from powershell

2 Answers2