Efficiently Building Directory Listings

[andshrew]

I have a file share with multiple millions of directories and tens of millions of files. I would like to to identify the paths to all files of a particular type but I'm not sure of the most efficient way of doing this.

At the most basic level I could use Powershell and recursively work from the top to the bottom with something like this, but I have no idea how it would behave over such a large structure.

get-childitem -force -recurse -filter "*.doc" | Select Name, FullName | Export-Csv dir.txt -Encoding ascii -NoTypeInformation

Does anyone have any experience or recommendations as to how to approach this?

 

[LizardKing]

dir?
ie the following will display the full file path of all .doc's in the dir and sub folders.


dir /A /S /B *.doc

output to file
dir /A /S /B *.jpg >>file.txt

 

[Deleted member 138126]

Why not just test it? It should just chug away in the background.

 

[Little_Crow]

The method LizardKing gives is probably the simplest way to do what you're asking.
dir is perfect for a basic report, not so good if you want a nicely formatted csv - It depends what purpose the data is being put to, are there other details you require like filesize, owner, etc?