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Searching file contents using PowerShell

Published on 25th October 2018 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Having made plenty of use of grep on the Linux/UNIX command and findstr on the legacy Windows command line, I wondered if PowerShell could be used to search the contents of files for a text string. Usefully, this turns out to be the case, but I found that the native functionality does not use what I have used before. The form of the command is given below:

Select-String -Path <filename search expression> -Pattern "<search expression>" > <output file>

While you can have the output appear on the screen, it always seems easier to send it to a file for subsequent use, and that is what I am doing above. The input to the -Path switch can be a filename or a wildcard expression, while that to the -Pattern can be a text string enclosed in quotes or a regular expression. Given that it works well once you know what to do, here is an example:

Select-String -Path *.sas -Pattern "proc report" > c:\temp\search.txt

The search.txt file then includes both the file information and the text that has been found for the sake of checking that you have what you want. What you do next is up to you.

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