How do I use square brackets in a wildcard pattern in PowerShell Get-ChildItem?

Question

I want to list all files ending with some text in square brackets.

But neither Get-ChildItem *[* nor Get-ChildItem *`[* nor Get-Child

Answer 1

The following, which includes one of the things you tried, should work, but currently[1] doesn't work due to a bug:

# SHOULD work, but CURRENTLY BROKEN:
Get-ChildItem *``[*    # 1st ` is for string parsing, 2nd ` for wildcard escaping
Get-ChildItem "*``[*"  # ditto, with double quotes
Get-ChildItem '*`[*'   # single-quoted alternative, requires only 1 `

Note that the use of a (the first) positional argument implicitly binds to Get-ChildItem's -Path parameter.

The intent is for Get-ChildItem to see the following literal after argument parsing: *`[*, which correctly escapes [ with ` in order to treat it as a literal.

As an aside: unquoted *`[* is equivalent to double-quoted "*`[*", which results in literal *[*, because PowerShell's string parsing interprets the ` and effectively removes it.

Workarounds:

Instead of escaping the [ character, enclose it in [...], a character-set expression, which causes it to be matched literally:

Get-ChildItem *[[]*  # OK

Interestingly, performing the filtering via -Include does not exhibit the bug:

Get-ChildItem * -Include '*`[*'  # OK

Another option is to use -Filter instead of (implied) -Path, as demonstrated in Paxz's answer, but note that -Filter's wildcard language is not the same as PowerShell's (as supported by the -Path and -Include / -Exclude parameters); the -Filter argument is passed to the Windows API, whose wildcard language differs as follows:

• It supports fewer constructs, notably no character sets or ranges ([...]).
• It has legacy quirks - see this answer.
• On the plus side, use of Filter, due to filtering at the source, performs better than letting PowerShell do the filtering via (implied) -Path or -Include.

Yet another option would be to add another layer of escaping, but that is ill-advised, because it will stop working once the bug is fixed:

# NOT RECOMMENDED: will stop working once the bug is fixed.
Get-ChildItem '*``[*' 

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^{[1] As of Windows PowerShell v5.1 / PowerShell Core 6.2.0-preview.3}