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PowerShell get folder capacity


Get the folder capacity using PowerShell via the old-school method.

Old-school since we will utilize the native “dir” command, just like the good old days of DOS.

PowerShell dir command output is not the same with the native windows system32 dir command line just like in DOS system.

The output will be in bytes since it is from the command line but of course, if you are command line junkie it will be easy to read even if the capacity is written in bytes.

First, fire up notepad write the dir command plus the full folder path of the specified folder in which you like to monitor or want to know the capacity.

 dir “c:\users\dmusic\music folder 001”

The path is enclosed in quotes since the folder has spaces and save the notepad as a batch file with “.bat” extension.

Open PowerShell command line window or PowerShell ISE and type the following command:

#change the path to where the batch file was saved

$folder_base_cap = d:\read_folder_cap.bat 

$ folder_base_cap | Select-String "bytes"

Output will be something like this:

  20 File(s)    767,933,737 bytes
  6 Dir(s)  347,740,835,840 bytes free

Basically, it is just running the system32 dir command and PowerShell is just selecting a string from its output. In this case the selected string is “bytes” in which that particular line with bytes also has the capacity of the folder.

This code is useful to monitor folder capacity and email the result to the person in-charge. How to send email using PowerShell is not part of this discussion but a quick web search will reveal the answer.

Check out this link for another method to check folder size.


Well, that’s it. PowerShell offers a lot of variety to make life easier and use it in a good way.


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