Hello all.

In many times we have to create more than only one condition to filter the outcome of a result. This produces a lot of unnecessary code and ends up in a bloated code as we can see in this example:

Get-WMIObject Win32_LogicalDisk -filter "DriveType = 3" -ComputerName $computer -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | 
%{Get-ChildItem ('\\' + $computer + '\' + ($_.DeviceID).remove(1) + '$\*') -File *.doc,*.docx -Recurse -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | 
?{($_.fullname -notmatch "Windows") -and ($_.fullname -notmatch "Program Files") -and ($_.fullname -notmatch "Program Files (x86)")} |
Add-Content $env:TEMP\$computer.txt

This can be simplified by using Regex. In Regex the pipe “|” means the operation “or”. So we can concat a lot of conditions by using the pipe in the matching string. But be careful. You have to escape every character which is defined in Regex.

This can also be done with the “Escape” function from the Regex class:

[Regex]::Escape($string)

By using this the following code can be compressed

?{($_.fullname -notmatch "Windows") -and ($_.fullname -notmatch "Program Files") -and ($_.fullname -notmatch "Program Files (x86)")}

to this

?{($_.fullname -notmatch "Windows|Program Files|Program Files \(x86\)") 

And more complex esclusions can be added to a hashtable to get an better overview.

$exclusions=@(
"Windows"
"Program Files"
"Program Files (x86)"
)

$exclusions=($exclusions -join "|").Replace('(','\(').Replace(')','\)')

?{($_.fullname -notmatch $exclusions) 

Have fun by using this little trick.

~David