I have started learning powershell a couple of days ago, and I couldn't find anything on google that does what I need so please bear with my question.
I have been asked to replace some text strings into multiple files. I do not necessarily know the extension of the possible target files and I don't know their location either. So far I have managed to recursively browse into the directory (get-ChildItem -recurse
) and find the string I was looking for with get-content and select-string:
Get-ChildItem -recurse | Get-Content | Select-String -pattern "dummy"
The problem is, I can see the occurences of the text I am looking for, but I don't know how to tell PS to return the path and the name for every matching files as well.
How can I get the name and location of the files that contains the expression I am looking for?
This should give the location of the files that contain your pattern:
Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Select-String "dummy" -List | Select Path
There are a variety of accurate answers here, but here is the most concise code for several different variations. For each variation, the top line shows the full syntax and the bottom shows terse syntax.
Item (2) is a more concise form of the answers from Jon Z and manojlds, while item (1) is equivalent to the answers from vikas368 and buygrush.
List FileInfo objects for all files containing pattern: Get-ChildItem -Recurse filespec | Where-Object { Select-String pattern $_ -Quiet } ls -r filespec | ? { sls pattern $_ -q } List file names for all files containing pattern: Get-ChildItem -Recurse filespec | Select-String pattern | Select-Object -Unique Path ls -r filespec | sls pattern | select -u Path List FileInfo objects for all files not containing pattern: Get-ChildItem -Recurse filespec | Where-Object { !(Select-String pattern $_ -Quiet) } ls -r filespec | ? { !(sls pattern $_ -q) } List file names for all files not containing pattern: (Get-ChildItem -Recurse filespec | Where-Object { !(Select-String pattern $_ -Quiet) }).FullName (ls -r filespec | ? { !(sls pattern $_ -q) }).FullName
-List
parameter of Select-String
This is how I would do it, you don't need get-content:
ls -r | Select-String dummy | select line,path
or
ls -r | Select-String dummy | fl *
To see what the different properties are...
This is faster. The second argument is -filter:
ls -r . *.bat | select-string netsh
ls -r . -filter *.bat | select-string netsh
select Pattern, LineNumber, Filename
for more concise output. Line returns EVERYTHING on the line containing your pattern string. You can also easily output this to a csv if you'd wish.
select Path, LineNumber, Line
is more concise. Pattern is redundant since you already know what it is
This will display the path, filename and the content line it found that matched the pattern.
Get-ChildItem -Path d:\applications\*config -recurse | Select-String -Pattern "dummy"
Pipe the content of your
Get-ChildItem -recurse | Get-Content | Select-String -pattern "dummy"
to fl *
You will see that the path is already being returned as a property of the objects.
IF you want just the path, use select path
or select -unique path
to remove duplicates:
Get-ChildItem -recurse | Get-Content | Select-String -pattern "dummy" | select -unique path
-File
switch to Get-ChildItem
or you end up with a never ending cascade of errors from trying to call Get-Content
on directories.
(Get-ChildItem -recurse | Get-Content | Select-String -pattern "dummy").FullName
People seem to forget PowerShell is object oriented; when in doubt, look for a property
Get-ChildItem -r | ? {$_.psiscontainer -eq $false} | ? {gc $_.pspath |select-string -pattern "dummy"}
This will give you the full details of all files
-r
worked. Figured you had to always do -Recurse
I modified one of the answers above to give me a bit more information. This spared me a second query later on. It was something like this:
Get-ChildItem `
-Path "C:\data\path" -Filter "Example*.dat" -recurse | `
Select-String -pattern "dummy" | `
Select-Object -Property Path,LineNumber,Line | `
Export-CSV "C:\ResultFile.csv"
I can specify the path and file wildcards with this structures, and it saves the filename, line number and relevant line to an output file.
To keep the complete file details in resulting array you could use a slight modification of the answer posted by vikas368 (which didn't seem to work well with the ISE autocomplete):
Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Where-Object { $_ | Select-String -Pattern "dummy" }
or in short:
ls -r | ?{ $_ | Select-String -Pattern "dummy" }
If you search into one directory, you can do it:
select-string -Path "c:\temp\*.*" -Pattern "result" -List | select Path
This will display a list of the full path to each file that contains the search string:
foreach ($file in Get-ChildItem | Select-String -pattern "dummy" | Select-Object -Unique path) {$file.path}
Note that it doesn't display a header above the results and doesn't display the lines of text containing the search string. All it tells you is where you can find the files that contain the string.
With PowerShell, go to the path where your files are and then type this command and replace ENTER THE STRING YOU SEARCH HERE
(but keep the double quotes):
findstr /S /I /M /C:"ENTER THE STRING YOU SEARCH HERE" *.*
Have a nice day 🙂
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parameter. Try adding| %{Move-Item $_.name <destination>}
Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Select-String "dummy" -List | Select Path
returns only the first match for each file so may be a little more efficient and avoids the need to group themtxt
files, if you useGet-ChildItem -Recurse -Filter *.txt
insteadforeach
loop if you're doing large operations like that. It becomes very convoluted when you try to do all of that on one line and it is very easy to make a large mistake. I speak from experience