PowerShell that crawls your Android usb folder structure

readme.md

Crawl your Android device attached via usb with PowerShell

The PowerShell script Crawl_Android.ps1 is capable of crawling your Android device when it is attached via usb. Just execute Crawl_Android.ps1 and select the device from the menu.

Limited file details

What I found out is that the Shell Namespace API does not provide a lot of details of the file. It is limited to only a couple of fields that are relevant for the Windows Explorer GUI. Strangely, a byte-oriented filesize field is not part of it. It only contains a summarized version, e.g. 4 kB or 10 MB. After futher investigation, I noticed that Windows Explorer has to make a local temporary copy to get all the details in order to populate the information pane. That's why most operations are so slow!

Crawl_Android.ps1

# http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2013/04/26/use-powershell-to-work-with-windows-explorer.aspx
$o = New-Object -com Shell.Application
$folder = $o.NameSpace(0x11)

# https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb774096(v=vs.85).aspx
# ShellSpecialFolderConstants.ssfDRIVES == 0x11

$items = $folder.Items()
for ($i= 0; $i -lt $items.Count; $i++) {
    write-output ([string]$i + ": " + $items.Item($i).Name)
}
$choice = Read-Host "Make your choice"

$android = $items.Item([int]$choice)
$root = $android.GetFolder()

# FolderItem versus FolderItems

$maxdepth = Read-Host "Max depth"

Function Write-Items($item, $depth, $maxdepth) {
    if ($depth -ge $maxdepth) {
        return;
    }
    $indent = ""
    for ($i = 0; $i -lt $depth; $i++) {
        $indent += "   ";
    }
    #write-output ($indent + "Name: " + $item.name)
    if ($item.Title) {
        $hash = @{
            Name = $item.Title
            Size = $null #$item.ParentFolder.GetDetailsOf($item, 2)
            Modified = $null #$item.ParentFolder.GetDetailsOf($item, 3)
            Parent = $item.ParentFolder.Title
            Level = $depth
        }
        $Object = New-Object PSObject -Property $hash            
        write-output $object
    } else {
        $hash = @{
            Name = $item.Name
            Size = $item.Parent.GetDetailsOf($item, 2)
            Modified = $item.Parent.GetDetailsOf($item, 3)
            Parent = $item.Parent.Title
            Level = $depth
        }
        $Object = New-Object PSObject -Property $hash            
        Write-Output $object
    }
    if ($item.Count -gt 0) {
        # $item is a folder with its own items
        for ($i = 0; $i -lt $item.Count) {
            $item2 = $item.item($i)
            Write-Items $item2 $depth+1 $maxdepth
        }

    }
    else { 
        if ($item.Items) {
            $items = $item.Items()
            if ($items.Count -gt 0) {
                foreach ($i in $items) {
                    if ($i.IsFolder) {
                        $folder = $i.GetFolder()
                        Write-Items $folder ($depth+1) $maxdepth
                    }
                    else {                    
                        Write-Items $i ($depth+1) $maxdepth
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        else {
            # .Count == 0 and no Items present
            # we don't need to do anything further here
        }
    }
}

Write-Items $root 0 $maxdepth | Out-GridView

Thank you! This works. I did have to change $android.GetFolder() to $android.GetFolder in two places. Thanks to you both.