Duncan Smith

>
> There isn't a native PowerShell cmdlet that replaces strings in files in place. However there is a -replace operator that provides the basic replace functionality. You will need to do this in several steps:
>
> $pattern = 'some search pattern - could be regex'
> $replacement = 'some replacement potentially using capture groups like so $1 $2 or ${namedGroup}'
> foreach ($file in (gci c:\temp\* -rec)) {
> $text = get-content $file
> if ($text -match $pattern) {
> $text -replace $pattern, $replacement > $file
> }
>
> }
>

That looks interesting, I was still thinking of a solution using the
Win32 Unix tools find, egrep and sed, bur their sed implementation
didn't update files in place so it all fell a bit flat..

I'm a little puzzled by where -match and -replace come from, as they
are not native to powershell and do not appear to be members of the
string class either. Do they belong to an object - I can't find the
documentation in MSDN 2005?

Thanks,

Duncan.