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List Directories That Haven’t Been Updated in X Amount Of Time Powershell

How to list directories that haven’t been updated in X amount of time. To find this we’re going to use Get-ChildItem and the LastWriteTime property. Here is what the mini script looks like.

List Directories That Haven’t Been Updated

#Enter in the path to search for.
#Using the 'Recurse' switch will search through all sub-directories as well.
$Path = "\\PAC-FS01\Apps"

#Searching for directories that haven't been updated in 6 Months.
Get-ChildItem -Path $Path -Recurse -Directory | Where-Object {($_.LastWriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddMonths(-6) )} | select FullName, LastWriteTime | Export-Csv C:\Oldfiles.csv -NoTypeInformation

Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Directory
 

Normally when a file is modified the parent directory will also show modified. Here in my example I haven’t modified any files in my 2012 SCCM Setup Files.

Export-Csv Old Unmodified directories
 

Note: Just because the file has not been modified doesn’t mean it hasn’t been accessed.

Hopefully this little quick tip was enough to get you started. From here you can easily move the files and directories using the Robocopy cmdlet with the switches in the MS post. Or if you’re feeling really brave, you can pipe the results to a Remove-Item to delete all those old files, however I would be very cautious before doing this and generally not recommend it.

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Paul Contreras

Hi, my name is Paul and I am a Sysadmin who enjoys working on various technologies from Microsoft, VMWare, Cisco and many others. Join me as I document my trials and tribulations of the daily grind of System Administration.

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