send it to us<\/B><\/A>; we\u2019d love to see what you did.<\/P>\nAnd if you can only send that late at night, after normal working hours, that\u2019s fine; if he has to, the Scripting Guy who writes this column can stay late and wait for your email to arrive. Sure, he might miss his trip to the gym but duty calls, right?<\/P>\n
As for the script that we<\/I> came up with, we start out by using the Get-ChildItem<\/B> cmdlet to retrieve a collection of all the files in the folder C:\\Logs. As soon as we\u2019ve grabbed all the files we immediately pipe the data to the Sort-Object<\/B> cmdlet, asking Sort-Object to sort all the files by their CreationTime<\/B> property. We store the sorted collection in a variable named $colFiles.<\/P>\n
The $colFiles variable now contains a nice little collection of all the files in the folder C:\\Logs, sorted by the file creation date. That\u2019s all well and good, except for one thing: we don\u2019t want a collection of all<\/I> the files in the folder C:\\Logs. Instead, we\u2019re interested only in the files that include the target string Failed<\/I>. What does that mean? That means we still have some work to do.<\/P>\n
With that in mind, our next chore is to set up a foreach loop that allows us to loop through all the files in the collection; that\u2019s what this line of code is for:<\/P>
foreach ($objFile in $colFiles)\n<\/PRE>\nInside this loop we use the Select-String<\/B> cmdlet to search the first file in the collection for the string value Failed<\/I>; any instances of that value that we find in the file will be stored in the variable $strMatch:<\/P>$strMatch = Select-String -path $objFile -pattern “Failed”\n<\/PRE>\nStill with us? Good, because \u2013 believe it or not \u2013 we\u2019re almost done. How do we know whether or not this first file contains the string value Failed<\/I>? That\u2019s easy; we just check to see if $strMatch has a value of some kind:<\/P>if ($strMatch)\n<\/PRE>\nWhat if $strMatch doesn\u2019t<\/I> have a value? That\u2019s no big deal; that simply means that the first file in the collection doesn\u2019t contain the target text Failed<\/I>. Consequently, we go back to the top of the loop and repeat the process with the next file in the collection.<\/P>\n
Of course, things are a little different if $strMatch has<\/I> a value; that means that the file in question does<\/I> contain the target value Failed<\/I>. But, again, no big deal; in that case, we simply echo back the value of the file\u2019s FullName<\/B> and CreationTime properties:<\/P>($objFile.FullName + ” ” + $objFile.CreationTime)\n<\/PRE>\nFrom there it\u2019s back to the top of the loop, where we try again with the next file in the collection. By the time we\u2019ve finished looping through all the files in C:\\Logs we should see output similar to this onscreen:<\/P>
C:\\Scripts\\test.txt 2\/15\/2008 7:04:29 PM\nC:\\Scripts\\z.txt 3\/10\/2008 9:05:15 AM\nC:\\Scripts\\mylog.txt 4\/18\/2008 12:54:47 PM\nC:\\Scripts\\testlog.log 1 4\/18\/2008 1:03:26 PM\nC:\\Scripts\\testfile.csv 4\/18\/2008 1:06:03 PM\n<\/PRE>\nNot the prettiest output in the world, but you get the idea.<\/P>\n
Incidentally, the one complicating factor here \u2013 at least for the Scripting Guys \u2013 was the need to echo back the file creation date along with the file name. Suppose all we cared about was the name of each file where the target text was found. In that case, this single line of code would do the trick:<\/P>
Select-String -path “C:\\Logs\\*.*” -pattern “Failed” -list | Select-Object Path\n<\/PRE>\nWhat we\u2019re doing here is asking Select-String to look at each and every file in the folder C:\\Logs and see if it can find the word Failed<\/I>. In addition, we\u2019ve tacked on the \u2013list<\/B> parameter, which tells Select-String that we only want to find the first match in each file. What if we left this parameter off? Well, suppose that the file Test.txt contained 10 instances of the word Failed<\/I>. In that case, we\u2019d get back 10 instances of Text.txt, one for each match.<\/P>\n
Oh, and if all we did was call Select-String by itself without piping it to Select-Object we\u2019d get output similar to this:<\/P>
C:\\Scripts\\mylog.txt:2:Failed\nC:\\Scripts\\test.txt:13:Failed\nC:\\Scripts\\testfile.csv:2:Failed\nC:\\Scripts\\testlog.log:2:Failed\nC:\\Scripts\\z.txt1:7:Failed\n<\/PRE>\nAs you can see, that\u2019s actually more information than we need; it includes not only the file Path<\/B>, but also the line number where the target text was found (e.g., 2) and the target text itself. We can get rid of the line number and the target text by piping the output to Select-Object<\/B>, and asking Select-Object to filter out everything except the Path property. Now our output should look like this:<\/P>C:\\Scripts\\mylog.txt\nC:\\Scripts\\test.txt\nC:\\Scripts\\testfile.csv\nC:\\Scripts\\testlog.log\nC:\\Scripts\\z.txt\n<\/PRE>\nVery nice, but, as you can see, no file creation date; that\u2019s because the Select-String cmdlet doesn\u2019t retrieve the file creation date. In turn, that\u2019s why we kicked things off by using Get-ChildItem; Get-ChildItem knows everything there is to know about file creation dates.<\/P>\n
We hope that answers your question, JS. Listen, as long as you\u2019re here, you don\u2019t happen to need an 18-year-old first baseman\/pitcher do you? No, no reason for asking. We were just wondering.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hey, Scripting Guy! Using Windows PowerShell, how can I search for a string value in all the files in a folder full of text files, then report back the file name and creation date for each file where that string value was found? Oh, and I\u2019d like to have these files sorted by date, too.— […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":595,"featured_media":87096,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13,3,4,14,45],"class_list":["post-55603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scripting","tag-dates-and-times","tag-scripting-guy","tag-scripting-techniques","tag-text-files","tag-windows-powershell"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"
Hey, Scripting Guy! Using Windows PowerShell, how can I search for a string value in all the files in a folder full of text files, then report back the file name and creation date for each file where that string value was found? Oh, and I\u2019d like to have these files sorted by date, too.— […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/595"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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