Get-ChildItem -File or -Directory doesn't work under different user context

Question

I have a PowerShell cmdlet with the following line

$items = Get-ChildItem -Path $FolderName -File -Force |
         Sort CreationTime |
         Select -First 1 -Last 1

It works fine under my normal login but if I log onto my machine as a domain admin I get an error message telling me that -File is not recognised as a valid parameter for Get-ChildItem.

I suspected that the domain admin was running an earlier version of PowerShell so under both accounts I have run $PSVersionTable.PSVersion and get the following:

Major  Minor  Build  Revision
-----  -----  -----  --------
5      0      10586  117

If anything I would expect my local login to fail and the domain admin login to succeed due to permissions differences but it seems to be working the other way around.

Answer 1

Could Get-ChildItem somehow have been overwritten in your $profile or something else?

You can check what Get-ChildItem executes if you run this:

get-command Get-ChildItem

CommandType     Name                                               Version    Source
-----------     ----                                               -------    ------
Cmdlet          Get-ChildItem                                      3.1.0.0    Microsoft.PowerShell.Management

If it is overwritten by doing something like this:

Function Get-ChildItem { }

Then it will would show this:

get-command Get-ChildItem

CommandType     Name                                               Version    Source
-----------     ----                                               -------    ------
Function        Get-ChildItem

If that would be the case, you can remove the custom version with

Remove-Item Function:\Get-ChildItem

You could also try to not use the -File parameter, and rather filter out folders yourself:

$items = Get-ChildItem -Path $FolderName -Force | 
    Where PSIsContainer -eq $False |
    Sort CreationTime |
    Select -First 1 -Last 1