Get-ChildItem recurse as a parameter in PowerShell

A couple of things here. First, you don't want to use [boolean] for the type of the recurse parameter. That requires that you pass an argument for the Recurse parameter on your script e.g. -Recurse $true. What you want is a [switch] parameter as shown below. Also, when you forward the switch value to the -Recurse parameter on Get-ChildItem use a : as shown below:

param (    [string] $sourceDirectory = ".",    [string] $fileTypeFilter = "*.log",    [switch] $recurse)get-childitem $sourceDirectory -recurse:$recurse -filter $fileTypeFilter | ...

The PowerShell V1 way to approach this is to use the method described in the other answers (-recurse:$recurse), but in V2 there is a new mechanism called splatting that can make it easier to pass the arguments from one function to another.

Splatting will allow you to pass a dictionary or list of arguments to a PowerShell function. Here's a quick example.

$Parameters = @{    Path=$home    Recurse=$true}Get-ChildItem @Parameters

Inside of each function or script you can use $psBoundParameters to get the currently bound parameters. By adding or removing items to $psBoundParameters, it's easy to take your current function and call a cmdlet with some the functions' arguments.

I hope this helps.

I asked a similar question before... My accepted answer was basically that in v1 of PowerShell, just passing the named parameter through like:

get-childitem $sourceDirectory -recurse:$recurse -filter ...