Greetings Kenny

In regards to your question on scanning for a directory size…

I think I would use a different approach for finding the results of a remote directory size.  A good choice for this is the “Get-ChildItem” cmdlette.

The DOS version of this is simply the DIR command.

Unlike VBScript, Powershell doesn’t have a direct method for getting a folder size, but there is a work around. You can use the “Measure-Object –Sum” cmdlette and properties to calculate the data.

Let’s say I want to calculate the size of the c:\temp directory on my local computer.

The command would look like this:

We are creating a resulting PowerShell object with the properties of count, average, sum, etc.

We are only assigning a value to Sum.

So how would that be used to calculate the size of a folder on a remote server?  Instead of using “c:\temp” you could put in any path, including a URL.  Here is the conceptual example.

I am using –recurse to check all subfolders, and –force to check hidden and system files.

Get-ChildItem \\servername\c$\temp -recurse -force | select Length |Measure-Object -Sum length

In your comment you indicated that you wanted to check the size of E:\VM on multiple servers.  You could pull the server name out of a text file.  The text file could be called server.txt

Assuming I put the file containing my list of servers to check at c:\servers.txt, the command could like this.

$path = “\\$serverName\E$\VM“

foreach ($serverName in (get-content c:\servers.txt))

{

       $dirSize = Get-ChildItem $path -recurse -force | select Length  |Measure-Object -Sum length    

       $dirSize #Output the result to the screen.

}

That works, but the result is kind of awkward as output is in bytes instead of MB.

We can dress this up by applying formatting to the result, and converting to MB.

…

$dirSize = Get-ChildItem $path -recurse -force | select Length  |Measure-Object -Sum length

$dirSize.sum = $dirSize.sum/1MB

$finalResult = “{0:N2} MB” -f $result.sum

…

Now the resulting directory size would be in MB.

One more way to improve this would be to collect each iteration of the “foreach” cmdlette, and put into an object so that would could get the result into a CSV file, or maybe output to the out-gridview cmdlette.

Here is the result of all that code..

$dataColl = @()#Makes an array, or a collection to hold all the object of the same fields.

foreach ($serverName in (get-content c:\servers.txt))

{

       $path = “\\$serverName\e$\VM“

       $dirSize = Get-ChildItem $path -recurse -force | select Length  |Measure-Object -Sum                   length

       $dirSize.sum = $dirSize.sum/1MB

       $finalResult = “{0:N2} MB” -f $result.sum

       $dataObject = New-Object PSObject

       Add-Member -inputObject $dataObject -memberType NoteProperty -name “ServerName” -value                 $serverName

       Add-Member -inputObject $dataObject -memberType NoteProperty -name “Dir_Size” -value                   $finalResult

       $dataColl += $dataObject  

       $dataObject

}

$dataColl | Out-GridView -Title “Remote Directory Scan Results”

$dataColl | Export-Csv -noTypeInformation -path c:\temp.csv

Here is the resulting “Out-GridView”.  I’ve smudged out the actual server names I used.

The resulting output is also available in the temp.CSV file at the root of my C: drive.

Depending on your number of servers, network, and folder sizes this could take a while to run.  I would save it to a script and run it from a separate Powershell window so you don’t have to stare at it while it runs.

Please let me know if this helps, and if you have any further questions.

Have a nice day.

Patrick

• System Administration