Often you may want to use PowerShell to get only the first file from a folder.
You can use the following syntax to do so:
Get-ChildItem -File | Select-Object -First 1
This particular example will return the first filename from the current directory.
Here is what the various commands do:
- Get-ChildItem -File: Retrieve all files in current directory
- Select-Object -First 1: Specifies that only the first file should be returned
Note that you can use -First N to instead return the first N files from a folder if you would like.
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: Use PowerShell to Get First Filename from a Folder
We can use the Dir command to first view all files in our current directory:
We can see that our current directory has six total files.
Suppose that we would like to retrieve only the first file.
We can use the following syntax to do so:
Get-ChildItem -File | Select-Object -First 1
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that this returns only the first file from the folder.
Note that if you’d like to return only the filename itself then you can use the Name property:
(Get-ChildItem -File | Select-Object -First 1).Name
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that this returns only the first filename (athletes.txt) from the folder.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in PowerShell:
PowerShell: How to Get File Name from Path
PowerShell: How to Add Date to File Name
PowerShell: How to Delete All Files with Specific Extension
