Questions tagged [select-string]

Select-String is a powershell cmdlet that finds text in strings and files.

The Select-String cmdlet searches for text and text patterns in input strings and files. You can use it like Grep in UNIX and Findstr in Windows. You can type "Select-String" or its alias, "sls".

Select-String is based on lines of text. By default, Select-String finds the first match in each line and, for each match, it displays the file name, line number, and all text in the line containing the match. However, you can direct it to detect multiple matches per line, display text before and after the match, or display only a Boolean value (true or false) that indicates whether a match is found.

Select-String uses regular expression matching, but it can also perform a simple match that searches the input for the text that you specify.

Select-String can display all of the text matches or stop after the first match in each input file. It can also display all text that does not match the specified pattern. You can also specify that Select-String should expect a particular character encoding, such as when you are searching files of Unicode text.