using powershell to replace “find” or “findstr”

this is one of those things i’m blogging to remind myself instead of bugging hal rottenberg. :)

in order to find something inside a list of files, you can use find or findstr. what’s the difference between those? findstr is a bit more robust, accepting pattern matches with regex, for example. in most cases though, i’m just looking for a string inside of a list of text files. so here we go with find and the general output we can expect…

C:\temp>find /i "wscript.echo" *.*

---------- DATE2INTEGER8.VBS
' wscript.Echo CurrentDate(Now)
' WScript.Echo CurrentDate(dDateThreshold)
      WScript.Echo oRecordSet.Fields("cn") & ":" & oRecordSet.Fields("displayname") & ":" & Integer8Date(oRecordSet.Fields("pwdlastset").Value,lBias)

---------- DLNAMES.TXT

---------- DNS_DEBUG.LOG

---------- TEMP_SCRIPT.SM
 WScript.Echo
 WScript.Echo "=========================================="
 WScript.Echo "Computer: " & strComputer
 WScript.Echo "=========================================="
    WScript.Echo "ArpAlwaysSourceRoute: " & objItem.ArpAlwaysSourceRoute
    WScript.Echo "ArpUseEtherSNAP: " & objItem.ArpUseEtherSNAP

i was kind of perturbed about having to switch back and forth from cmd shell to powershell so i asked hal about it one day… and he told me to use select-string. it turns out if acts differently if you don’t pipe anything to select-string. as you can see, the output is much nicer too …

[12] » Select-String -SimpleMatch -Pattern "wscript.echo" -Path *.* | Format-Table filename, linenumber, line -autosize

Filename          LineNumber Line
--------          ---------- ----
date2integer8.vbs         11 ' wscript.Echo CurrentDate(Now)
date2integer8.vbs         12 ' WScript.Echo CurrentDate(dDateThreshold)
date2integer8.vbs         33     WScript.Echo oRecordSet.Fields("cn") & ":" &
temp_script.sm             8    WScript.Echo
temp_script.sm            10    WScript.Echo "Computer: " & strComputer
temp_script.sm            18       WScript.Echo "ArpAlwaysSourceRoute: " &
temp_script.sm            19       WScript.Echo "ArpUseEtherSNAP: " &
temp_script.sm            20       WScript.Echo "Caption: " & objItem.Caption

i purposely wrote the command verbosely for clarity. to be succinct, in this case, you’ll get the same result with:

ss "wscript.echo" *.* | ft f*, l* -auto