Question

I am looking to create a function that could toggle the ability to recurse in cmdlet Get-ChildItem.

As a very basic example:

...

param 
(   
    [string] $sourceDirectory = ".",
    [string] $fileTypeFilter = "*.log",
    [boolean] $recurse = $true
)

Get-ChildItem $sourceDirectory -recurse -filter $fileTypeFilter | 

...

How does one conditionally add the -recurse flag to Get-ChildItem without having to resort to some if/else statement?

I thought perhaps one could just substitute the -recurse in the Get-ChildItem statement with a $recurseText parameter (set to “-recurse” if $recurse were true), but that does not seem to work.

Answer 1

A couple of things here. First, you don’t want to use [boolean] for the type of the recurse parameter. That requires that you pass an argument for the Recurse parameter on your script e.g. -Recurse $true. What you want is a [switch] parameter as shown below. Also, when you forward the switch value to the -Recurse parameter on Get-ChildItem use a : as shown below:

param (
    [string] $sourceDirectory = ".",
    [string] $fileTypeFilter = "*.log",
    [switch] $recurse
)

get-childitem $sourceDirectory -recurse:$recurse -filter $fileTypeFilter | ...