PowerShell – Get-Item

Windows PowerShell – Get-Item Cmdlet

PowerShell’s Get-ChildItem has a little sister called Get-Item.

Topics – Examples of Get-Item

• Real Life Example: List Environmental Variables
• Research Get-Item’s Parameters
• Find the Alias of Get-Item
• Summary – PowerShell Script to Delete Files

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Real Life Example: List Environmental Variables

Our mission here is to list all the Environmental Variables.  For example, if we want to research which folder holds the user’s profile files.

Result:

See more about Env:temp

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Research Get-Item’s Parameters

The principle difference between Get-Item and Get-ChildItem, is the later has a -Recurse parameter.

Differences Between Get-Item and Get-ChildItem

Get-Item returns information on just the object specified, whereas Get-ChildItem lists all the objects in the container.  Take for example the C:\ drive.

Result:

Get-ChildItem would list all the files and folders under the C:\   Incidentally, you could get the same effect by adding a wildcard.
Get-Item C:\* is the same as plain Get-ChildItem C:\

Conclusion:
While the behaviour of these two cmdlets is very similar, there a few differences which can catch you unawares.  My conclusion is stick with Get-ChildItem, I have yet to find a killer use of the shorter Get-Item.

Find the Alias of Get-Item

Get-ChildItem has the famous alias gci, but what of Get-Item?

Result: gi

See also how PowerShell deletes temporary Windows files.

Summary of PowerShell Get-Item

Get-Item does what says: namely it returns the properties of the object specified.  In this example it enables us to research the operating system’s environmental variables.

See More Windows PowerShell Examples of Real-life Tasks

• PowerShell Tutorials  • PowerShell Examples  • IpConfig  • Get-Counter  • PowerShell NetSh

• Monitor Performance – PowerShell  • PowerShell temp   • PowerShell Delete Temporary files

• PowerShell WOL (Wake-on-Lan)  • Services   • Change Computer Description Registry

Please email me if you have a better example script. Also please report any factual mistakes, grammatical errors or broken links, I will be happy to correct the fault.