How to search a string in multiple files and return the names of files in Powershell?

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?

11 Answers

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.

1. List FileInfo objects for all files containing pattern:

   Get-ChildItem -Recurse filespec | Where-Object { Select-String pattern $_ -Quiet } ls -r filespec | ? { sls pattern $_ -q } 

2. 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 

3. 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) } 

4. 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 

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 

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 

Get-ChildItem -r | ? {$_.psiscontainer -eq $false} | ? {gc $_.pspath |select-string -pattern "dummy"} 

This will give you the full details of all files

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 🙂