The Bits 2.0

Say you want to sort the output of “ls” (Get-ChildItem) according to file size, date modified or alphabetically, try:

1. Sort according to file size:

ls | sort -property Length

2. Sort according to data modified:

ls | sort -property LastWriteTime

3. Sort according to Name:

ls | sort -property Name

or just simply:

ls

To return a descending list, just add -descending at the back. This applies any stdout pipes, not just Get-ChildItem.

Answer: Yes there is! Prodigy Mark Russinovich wrote the Windows counterpart of UNIX’s indispensable du command called, uhm, du: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896651.aspx

Copy du.exe to %Windir%/System32. (The /usr/bin equivalent of Windows).

To obtain the size of top level subdirectories in a directory, with the largest on first in Bash@Linux, we type:

du –max-depth=1 | sort -r

The equivalent for Powershell@Windows would be:

du -q -l 1 | sort -descending

What I would really like to see is Mark’s du.exe be able to return directory sizes in well, “human readable formats”: KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB etc etc. In UNIX’s du, the argument -h does the job.

UNIX users who are so used to grep would ask “how do I grep in Powershell?”. Here’s how:

In Bash we write:

ls | grep “.aspx”

The equivalent in Powershell would be:

ls | where {$_ -match “.aspx”}

Bash@Linux output:

[root@gw-1 easilogin]# ls -all | grep ".aspx"
-rwxrwSrwt 1 root root   682 Jul 29 20:38 AccountBanned.aspx
-rwxrwSrwt 1 root root    77 Jul 29 20:38 AccountBanned.aspx.vb
-rwxrwSrwt 1 root root  2320 Jul 29 20:38 CodeAuthentication.aspx
-rwxrwSrwt 1 root root  1623 Jul 29 20:38 CodeAuthentication.aspx.vb
-rwxrwSrwt 1 root root  1459 Aug  1 14:25 ForgetPassword.aspx
-rwxrwSrwt 1 root root  3563 Aug  1 14:25 ForgetPassword.aspx.vb
-rwxrwSrwt 1 root root  2888 Jul 29 20:38 login.aspx
-rwxrwSrwt 1 root root  8298 Jul 29 20:38 login.aspx.vb
-rwxrwSrwt 1 root root    98 Jun 23 12:54 logout.aspx
-rwxrwSrwt 1 root root  2864 Aug  3 21:12 My_Account.aspx
-rwxrwSrwt 1 root root  1704 Aug  3 21:12 My_Account.aspx.vb
-rwxrwSrwt 1 root root   475 Jul 29 20:38 NotAuthenticated.aspx
-rwxrwSrwt 1 root root    78 Jul 29 20:38 NotAuthenticated.aspx.vb

Powershell@Windows2008 output:

PS Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\FileSystem::\\192.168.1.11\inetpub\wwwroot\easilogin> ls | where {$_ -match ".aspx"}

Directory: Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\FileSystem::\\192.168.1.11\inetpub\wwwroot\easilogin

Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name
----                -------------     ------ ----
-a---         7/29/2008   8:38 PM        682 AccountBanned.aspx
-a---         7/29/2008   8:38 PM         77 AccountBanned.aspx.vb
-a---         7/29/2008   8:38 PM       2320 CodeAuthentication.aspx
-a---         7/29/2008   8:38 PM       1623 CodeAuthentication.aspx.vb
-a---          8/1/2008   2:25 PM       1459 ForgetPassword.aspx
-a---          8/1/2008   2:25 PM       3563 ForgetPassword.aspx.vb
-a---         7/29/2008   8:38 PM       2888 login.aspx
-a---         7/29/2008   8:38 PM       8298 login.aspx.vb
-a---         6/23/2008  12:54 PM         98 logout.aspx
-a---          8/3/2008   9:12 PM       2864 My_Account.aspx
-a---          8/3/2008   9:12 PM       1704 My_Account.aspx.vb
-a---         7/29/2008   8:38 PM        475 NotAuthenticated.aspx
-a---         7/29/2008   8:38 PM         78 NotAuthenticated.aspx.vb