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

Question

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

User · Answer

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" }

User · Answer

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    List FileInfo objects for all files containing pattern   Get-ChildItem -Recurse filespec   Where-Object   Select-String pattern    -Quiet   ls -r filespec       sls pattern    -q    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  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     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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

If you search into one directory  you can do it   select-string -Path  c  temp      -Pattern  result   -List   select Path

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

Get-ChildItem -r         psiscontainer -eq  false       gc    pspath  select-string -pattern  dummy     This will give you the full details of all files

User · Answer

This should give the location of the files that contain your pattern   Get-ChildItem -Recurse   Select-String  dummy  -List   Select Path

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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  quot ENTER THE STRING YOU SEARCH HERE quot       Have a nice day

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

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