Powershell function to count files using Robocopy

Reading the post title you maybe wondering whether I’ve taken leave of my senses.  Why call Robocopy from Powershell to count files when Powershell has a perfectly good method of doing this natively? For example,

(Get-ChildItem e:\powershell -Recurse -force | ?{! $_.PSIsContainer} | Measure-Object).count

Well, the problem comes in when an individual file length exceeds 260 characters.  At this point Powershell throws an error similar to the one below.

Get-ChildItem : The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters.

At E:\Powershell\CountFiles.ps1:243 char:32

+ $hcountpost = (Get-ChildItem e:\powershell -Recurse -force | Measure-Obj …

+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

+ CategoryInfo : ReadError: (\\myserver\homed… – blah blah:String) [Get-ChildItem], PathTooLongException

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : DirIOError,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.GetChildItemCommand

The problem is not so much to do with Powershell as the underlying .NET APIs, as the following article succinctly explains.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bclteam/archive/2007/02/13/long-paths-in-net-part-1-of-3-kim-hamilton.aspx

This is where Robocopy comes in handy as it doesn’t suffer from the same limitations.  On the other hand Robocopy has its own output formatting that doesn’t play nicely with Powershell.  I came across a very handy code snippet from MVP Boe Prox that can help with this.  The only change I have made is to roll it up into a function (shown below for your pleasure).

Function Count-Files ($path) {
    $params = New-Object System.Collections.Arraylist
    $params.AddRange(@("/L","/S","/NJH","/BYTES","/FP","/NC","/NDL","/TS","/XJ","/R:0","/W:0"))
    $countPattern = "^\s{3}Files\s:\s+(?\d+).*"
    $sizePattern = "^\s{3}Bytes\s:\s+(?\d+(?:\.?\d+)).*"
    $return = robocopy $path NULL $params
    If ($return[-5] -match $countPattern) {
        $Count = $matches.Count
    } # end if
    else {
    $Count = 0
    } # end else
    Return $count
} # end Count-Files function

Enjoy.