use powershell to check whether or not a sharepoint list is a document library

Question

I want to make some changes to all of the document libraries in a site collection, but not make changes to any other lists. In PowerShell, how can I check whether a list is a document library, or a different kind of list?

Answer 1

To see the all the lists in a site, and if they are a document library or not, this PowerShell script should be helpful:

$web = get-spweb http://<your site url>
$lists = $web.lists
foreach ($list in $lists) {
   write-host $list.title, "(", $list.BaseType, ")"
}
$web.dispose()

I ran this on one of my sites, and it returned a mix of "GenericList" and "DocumentLibrary" as the BaseType property.

You can also look at the property $list.BaseTemplate along with $BaseType to narrow down the number of system generated document libraries that are returned.

-LB

Answer 2

Assuming you have instance of SPList in powershell, the BaseType of list would be SPBaseType.DocumentLibrary for list of type document library.

So that check may look like

if (oListObject.BaseType -eq [Microsoft.SharePoint.SPBaseType]::DocumentLibrary) {

}