Common questions 

How do you search for a word in a file in PowerShell?

Kobe Glover

How do you search for a word in a file in PowerShell?

Powershell: Search for String or grep for Powershell

  1. grep (options) files.txt.
  2. grep “text I search” *.log.
  3. Select-String -Path C:\temp\*.log -Pattern “Contoso”
  4. Get-ChildItem C:\temp -Filter *.log -Recurse | Select-String “Contoso”

How do you search for a string in a text file in PowerShell?

You can use Select-String similar to grep in UNIX or findstr.exe in Windows. Select-String is based on lines of text. By default, Select-String finds the first match in each line and, for each match, it displays the file name, line number, and all text in the line containing the match.

How do I search for a file in PowerShell?

How to Find a File and Check If It Exists with Powershell or Netwrix Auditor. Open the PowerShell ISE → Create a new script using the following code. In the $filename variable, specify a string that might indicate the file contains sensitive data, and for $searchinfolder, specify the directory or folder to search in.

How do I grep a string in PowerShell?

PowerShell brings the functionality of grep with the Select-String cmdlet.

  1. Use Select-String to Grep a Single File. To grep a simple text file is as easy as:
  2. Grep Recursively with Get-Childitem.
  3. Piping to Select-String.
  4. Loop through results from Select-String.

How do I search for text in a file?

How to Search for words within files on Windows 7

  1. Open windows explorer.
  2. Using the left hand file menu select the folder to search in.
  3. Find the search box in the top right hand corner of the explorer window.
  4. In the search box type content: followed by the word or phrase you are searching for.(eg content:yourword)

How do I search for a string in a text file?

Steps:

  1. Open a file.
  2. Set variables index and flag to zero.
  3. Run a loop through the file line by line.
  4. In that loop check condition using the ‘in’ operator for string present in line or not. If found flag to 0.
  5. After loop again check condition for the flag is set or not.
  6. Close a file.

How do I search for text in command prompt?

How to Search for Files from the DOS Command Prompt

  1. From the Start menu, choose All Programs→Accessories→Command Prompt.
  2. Type CD and press Enter.
  3. Type DIR and a space.
  4. Type the name of the file you’re looking for.
  5. Type another space and then /S, a space, and /P.
  6. Press the Enter key.
  7. Peruse the screen full of results.

What is $_ mean in PowerShell?

$_ in the PowerShell is the ‘THIS’ toke. It refers to the current item in the pipeline. It can be considered as the alias for the automatic variable $PSItem.

How to search for text in a file in PowerShell?

As far as I know, this is the quickest way to search through files with PowerShell. Instead of a simple text search, you can also direct the select-string cmdlet to detect multiple matches per line, display text before and after the match, or display only a Boolean value (True or False) that indicates whether a match is found.

How to find specific string in PowerShell Stack Overflow?

This method also works differently in that you are first getting the contents of the file with Get-Content, so this may be useful if you need to perform other operations on those contains after checking for your string’s existence.

How long does it take to search a file in PowerShell?

First you’d need to get a list of the files you want to search trough: Searching through a directory with about 50 files, which have a total size of 12,6MB and over 200.000 matches, only took 2 seconds this way. As far as I know, this is the quickest way to search through files with PowerShell.

How to tell PowerShell to show only files?

We can tell it to show only files by using PowerShell. This was introduced in version 3 of PowerShell. We can also use the the -Exclude parameter to say, “Don’t show me any TMP, MP3, or JPG files.: