So i am currently tackling a task I have been given as a challenge from my teacher, but it is safe to say I am pretty stumped. I am supposed to find a log file on a virtual machine drive which contains the specific keyword "x".
Is there a specific command I could use to search through every file for that keyword?
Thanks in advance :D
Select-String is the cmdlet you're looking for.
dir *.log | select-string 'stringtofind' -simplematch
or
dir *.log | select-string 'regex pattern
will output matching lines. The output is objects which points to the file, the line number, and the matching text (among other things).
-Recurse switch on dir (Get-ChildItem)There is no command I am aware of that will directly search for a file with a specific content. You will have to open each file, and use regex to find the string. You would use Get-Childitem to get a list of each file in the log directory, and then foreach item you would Get-Content and then check if that content has the string you are looking for.
However, if you wanted an A+, you could run the task of searching each file as a job or a runspace to check each file in parallel/new thread, which would greatly increase the speed of sorting through many files, but that is a more advanced technique.
Part of the lesson is learning how to code this, so I am omitting the code, and giving you the key commands you should be looking at.
you might be able to do something like:
Get-Childitem -Path path\to\search -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Select-String -pattern "jonathan.williams" | group path | select name
Update:
You can change it to
Get-Childitem -Path path\to\search -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Select-String "jonathan.williams"
to get the line number along with the file as well
