Often you may want to use the Out-File cmdlet in PowerShell to send output to a specific file.
By default, PowerShell will include a header row when outputting the data to a file.
However, you can use -ExpandProperty to prevent a header row from being included in the output:
Get-ChildItem | Select -ExpandProperty Name | Out-File my_files.txt
This particular example will export the names of the files in the current folder to a text file named my_files.txt and will not include a header row in the file.
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: How to Use Out-File with No Output Header in PowerShell
Suppose that we would like to export the names of all the files in the current folder to a text file.
We can use the ls command to first view all of the files in the current folder:
We can see that there are three text files in the folder.
Suppose that we attempt to use the Out-File cmdlet with the following syntax to output the names of these files to a text file named my_files.txt:
Get-ChildItem | Select Name | Out-File my_files.txt
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
When we use the Get-Content cmdlet to view the contents of the text file, we can see that a header row is included in the file by default.
To prevent a header row from being exported, we can use -ExpandProperty option as follows:
Get-ChildItem | Select -ExpandProperty Name | Out-File my_files.txt
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
When we use the Get-Content cmdlet to view the contents of the text file, we can see that no header row is included in the output file.
Note: You can find the complete documentation for the Out-File cmdlet in PowerShell here.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in PowerShell:
PowerShell: How to List Files in Directory by Date
PowerShell: How to List All Files in Directory to Text File
PowerShell: How to Delete All Files with Specific Extension
