Find files across all drives using Powershell

Question

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?

Answer 1

$drive = get-psdrive
foreach ($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.

Answer 2

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}

Answer 3

Not exactly answering your question (I don't know answer) but a question - do you have to use PowerShell? I've been a fan and avid user of Take Command from JPSoft for years (it used to be called 4DOS). You can certainly do this with TC.