Powershell - Find # of nested folders in long file path of a directory

Question

Can anyone help me w/ a code puzzle in powershell? I'm trying to look at a specific directory on several remote servers, and find the deepest nested subfolder in that directory and then count number of parent folders. Pseudo code below.

1. $servers = get-content (list of servers) and $path = (targetdir on remote machine)
2. for each $s in $servers:
3. find the longest path
4. count the # of \ (to identify # of subfolders)
5. Write output to file $Servername $countOfNestedFolders

Sorry I'm just good enough w/ posh to be a little dangerous.

Answer 1

here's a slight variant of the "count the path parts" solutions. [grin] it counts the delimiters. if your paths are UNC paths OR local paths, this will still give you the deepest nested dir.

however, it will not work with mixed UNC [\\SysName\ShareName] and local [c:\] paths.

also, it does not remove the starting dir from the result.

also also, i am unsure how you want to count number of parent folders. so i just posted the delimiter count.

what it does ...

• sets the top dir to work from
• gets the dir delimiter char
• creates a regex escaped version of that char
• grabs all the dirs in the target dir tree
• sorts [in descending order] them by the string length of what is left over when you remove everything except the dir delimiters
• grabs the 1st of those dirs
• displays the .FullName of that dir
• displays the number of dir delimiters in the above string

the code ...

$TargetTopDir = $env:APPDATA
$DirDelim = [System.IO.Path]::DirectorySeparatorChar
$RegexDD = [regex]::Escape($DirDelim)

$DirList = Get-ChildItem -LiteralPath $TargetTopDir -Directory -Recurse

$DeepestNestedDir = ($DirList |
    Sort-Object {$_.FullName -replace "[^$RegexDD]"} -Descending)[0]

$DeepestNestedDir.FullName
'DirDelimCount = {0}' -f ($DeepestNestedDir.FullName -replace "[^$RegexDD]").Length

output ...

C:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\shkjhmpc.default\extensions\{e2fda1a4-762b-4020-b5ad-a41df1933103}\chrome\calendar-gd\locale\gd\calendar\dialogs
DirDelimCount = 15