Can't exclude a directory pattern recursively

I'm trying to get child items of a folder recursively. However the folder contains noise files and folder (actually, this is a Visual Studio project folder).

Here what I have:

$root = Get-Item C:\Projects\MyProject
$allItems = Get-ChildItem $root -Recurse -exclude "**\pkgobj\*"

However, $allItems still contains files and folder matching the paths.

What I did wrong?

To be more precise, I want to get both folders and files, but not the specified folder, and any of its descendant.

I also tried:

foreach($item in $allItems){ if($item.FullName -notmatch "pkgobj") { Write-Host -ForegroundColor Green $item.FullName.Replace($root,'') }
}

But no more success

2 Answers

Took me a moment to understand the issue. Its a tricky one.

-exclude only applies to basenames of items (i.e. myfile.txt), not the fullname
(i.e. C:\pkgobj\myfile.txt) which you want. So you can't use exclude here.

But there is a workaround using Fullname and -notlike

$root = "C:\Projects\MyProject"
$allitems = Get-ChildItem $root -Recurse | Where {$_.FullName -notlike "*\pkgobj\*"} 

You want to avoid where statements when you can for performance reasons. To simplify a previous answer.

Get-childitem -path c:\windows -exclude 'temp' | get-childitem -recurse