2019-01-06-findcontentinfileswithpowershell.md

layout	post
title	Find content in files with PowerShell
date	2019-01-06
tags	PowerShell Search

Find content in files with PowerShell

Parse through the content of files with powershell to find errors and other troubleshooting information. Linux has grep. With PowerShell, we have Get-Content and Where-Object.

Search through a single file for references to the text "ERROR".

Get-Content logfile.txt | Where-Object { $_.Contains("ERROR") }

Count the number of lines containing “ERROR”.

@( Get-Content logfile.txt | Where-Object { $_.Contains("ERROR") } ).Count

Where-Object will return a string value containing a single match, and an array of lines for multiple matches.

In order for count to count the objects in the array the "@" is needed in the second command to perform count on the objects within the array.