PowerShell Fun: Recursive Folder Size

While playing around with some PowerShell scripts today, I was looking for some fun (??) ways to get a view of how big a folder and all of its' contents are. This is arguably pretty trivial, but we're just having fun, right? :-)

Here's the basic script I came up with:

function Get-ChildItemSizes(){
    ls | % -Begin { $results = @() } -Process {
        $size = ls $_ -Recurse | 
            measure -Sum -Property Length -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | 
            select -ExpandProperty Sum
        $thisOne = New-Object System.Object
        $thisOne | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name "Directory" -Value $_.Name
        $thisOne | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name "Size" -Value $size
        $results += $thisOne
    } -End { Write-Output $results }
}
    

This gives is the following sample output result set:

PS:\ Get-ChildItemSizes

Directory       Size
---------       ----
Folder B         578
Folder C          23
Folder A        1031
    

This is exactly the form we're looking for, as it allows us to answer questions such as "Show me the largest folder tree", which translates into this:

PS:\ Get-ChildItemSizes | sort -Property Size -Decending | select -First 1

Directory       Size
---------       ----
Folder A        1031
    

Alternatively, we could answer the question os "Show me the smallest folder tree", which simply becomes this:

PS:\ Get-ChildItemSizes | sort -Property Size -Ascending | select -First 1

Directory       Size
---------       ----
Folder C          23
    

The core of this snippet is simply a data pipeline based on the output of the ls (or rather Get-ChildItem) cmdlet. Each object in this output stream is used to "dive deep" into the the recursive structure underneath, aggregating the sum of the item sizes. The remainder of the process block is simply collecting results leveraging a local collection of NoteProperty objects.

Nothing to terribly complex, but a fun little experiment nonetheless. Enjoy!!!