Question

Using the following Powershell code, I’m trying to locate folders which do NOT contain robots.txt in the root. Normally, I could do this recursively but it’s taking FOREVER to recurse this massive folder structure. What I really need is only the first level, AKA search only the folders found in C:\Projects.

Basically I need to get children from each set of children, and only then return parents where there was no robots.txt file. The problem I’m having here is my $_ in the nested for loop is giving me the CWD, not the children of the directory I’m searching. I know I might have to use a -Where here but I’m a little over my head and pretty new to powershell. Any help is appreciated!

$drv = gci C:\Projects | %{
    $parent = $_; gci -exclude "robots.txt" | %{$_.parent}} | gu

Answer 1

this one-liner (spread over several for clarity) should do the trick for you:

# look directly in projects, not recursively
dir c:\projects | where {
    # returns true if $_ is a container (i.e. a folder)
    $_.psiscontainer
} | where {
    # test for existence of a file called "robots.txt"
    !(test-path (join-path $_.fullname "robots.txt"))
} | foreach {
    # do what you want to do here with $_
    "$($_.fullname) does not have robots.txt"
}