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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T04:41:27+00:00

I wanted to write a small script that searched for an exact file name,

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I wanted to write a small script that searched for an exact file name, not a string within a file name.

For instance if I search for ‘hosts’ using Explorer, I get multiple results by default. With the script I want ONLY the name I specify. I’m assuming that it’s possible?

I had only really started the script and it’s only for my personal use so it’s not important, it’s just bugging me. I have several drives so I started with 2 inputs, one to query drive letter and another to specify file name. I can search by extension, file size etc but can’t seem to pin the search down to an exact name.

Any help would be appreciated!

EDIT : Thanks to all responses. Just to update. I added one of the answers to my tiny script and it works well. All three responses worked but I could only use one ultimately, no offence to the other two. Cheers. Just to clarify, ‘npp’ is an alias for Notepad++ to open the file once found.

$drv = read-host "Choose drive"
$fname = read-host "File name"
$req = dir -Path $drv -r | Where-Object { !$PsIsContainer -and  [System.IO.Path]::GetFileNameWithoutExtension($_.Name) -eq $fname }
set-location $req.directory
npp $req
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    From a powershell prompt, use the gci cmdlet (alias for Get-ChildItem) and -filter option:

    gci -recurse -filter "hosts"

    This will return an exact match to filename “hosts“.

    SteveMustafa points out with current versions of powershell you can use the -File switch to give the following to recursively search for only files named “hosts” (and not directories or other miscellaneous file-system entities):

    gci -recurse -filter "hosts" -File

    The commands may print many red error messages like “Access to the path 'C:\Windows\Prefetch' is denied.“.

    If you want to avoid the error messages then set the -ErrorAction to be silent.

    gci -recurse -filter "hosts" -File -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

    An additional helper is that you can set the root to search from using -Path.
    The resulting command to search explicitly search from, for example, the root of the C drive would be

    gci -Recurse -Filter "hosts" -File -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -Path "C:\"
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