Can't exclude a directory pattern recursively

Question

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:ProjectsMyProject

$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

nixda · Accepted Answer

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:pkgobjmyfile.txt) which you want.   So you can't use exclude here.

But there is a workaround using Fullname and -notlike

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

user2291729 · Answer

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

Can't exclude a directory pattern recursively

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