Searching for content in text files with powershell

Hey all,

I need a powershell script that will search through all of the text files in
a directory, and copy those files that contain a given term into another
file. This is the line I am having trouble with:

Get-Content *.* | Select-String -pattern "$term" -context 20,20
-caseSensitive | Out-File E:\test.txt

With this, the script locates the terms all right, but because I had to use
context 20,20 in order to get the whole file where the term lives, it grabs a
bunch of useless data as well. Is there any way that I can just paste a file
where the term occurs?

Hi snofire, try this:

Select-String -pattern "$term" -context 20,20 -caseSensitive -Path <path>\*.*
-list | foreach { cat $_.path | Add-Content -Path c:\matches.txt -force}


Since you copy each matched file full content to another file, I don't think
the -context 20,20 is necessary.
If you need to perform recursive search, use:

get-childitem <path> -filter <wildcard> -recurse | Select-String -pattern
"$term" ... | foreach { cat $_.path | Add-Content -Path c:\matches.txt -force}

-----
Shay Levi
$cript Fanatic
http://scriptolog.blogspot.com
Hebrew weblog: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/scriptfanatic

The second command should look like this: (without ... )

get-childitem <path> -filter <wildcard> -recurse | Select-String -pattern
"$term" | foreach { cat $_.path | Add-Content -Path c:\matches.txt -force}


-----
Shay Levi
$cript Fanatic
http://scriptolog.blogspot.com
Hebrew weblog: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/scriptfanatic

Use Select-String's -Quiet switch --it returns a boolean value-- and filter the files that match with Where-Object to set their content to the new file:

set-content E:\test.txt (
get-childItem *.txt |
where {select-string $term $_ -quiet} |
get-content
)

--
Kiron

If $term is present more than once there'll be repeated content, to avoid this use Select-String's -List switch.

--
Kiron

Thank you all for your advice. I'll give it a whirl.