Finding a string in a text file and reporting full file name and size

Question

I have the following script to find files containing a certain string and then report on the location of the file along with the size in bytes.

It works, but I seem to have made heavy weather of finding the string which involves a fair bit of tidying up afterwards to produce some clean output.

Any idea how I could make this more concise?

# Ignore errors
$ErrorActionPreference= 'silentlycontinue'
# Grab user options
$ext = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter extension "
$huntString = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter hunt string "
# Find text files (.log, .txt etc) containing the hunt string
$entries = gci -recurse -include *.$ext -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | select fullname, length | sort -property length
echo ''
foreach ($e in $entries)
{ 
 # Find files containing the hunt string
 $foundFile = (gci $e.fullname | select-string $huntString | measure-object | findstr Count)
 # Output hit count along with size and name
 $rawOutput = $foundFile.ToString() + $e.Length.ToString().PadRight(10,[char]32) + "`t" + $e.fullname
 # Only output entries with a hit count
 $cleanOutput = echo $rawOutput | select-string ": 1"
 # Remove hit count
 $finalOutput = $cleanOutput -replace "Count","" -replace ": ",""
 # Trim and output
 echo $finalOutput.TrimStart()
}

Answer 1

Using findstr in PowerShell is superfluous and
not very powershell'ish which is about objects and pipes.

You can directly pipe the raw output of Get-ChildItem to Select-String and parse the resulting object for the information you require.

As the size of the file isn't contained in the properties sls returns:

Context Property
Filename Property
IgnoreCase Property
Line Property
LineNumber Property
Matches Property
Path Property
Pattern Property

You've to append it, either with a calculated property

# Grab user options
$ext = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter extension "
$huntString = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter hunt string "
Get-ChildItem *.$ext -Recurse | Select-String $huntString -List | 
 Select-Object @{Label='Size';Expression={(Get-Item $_.Path).Length}},Path

or iterate the output and build a [PSCustomObject]:

Get-ChildItem *.$ext -Recurse | Select-String $huntString -List | 
 ForEach-Object {
 [PSCustomObject]@{
 Path = $_.Path
 Size = (Get-Item $_.path).Length
 }
 }

The objectsoutput will be the very same:

> Q:\Test2018円12円17円\CR_209811.ps1
Enter extension : ps1
Enter hunt string : ::Now
Size Path
---- ----
 878 Q:\Test2018円09円18円\SO_52381514.ps1
 677 Q:\Test2018円11円16円\SO_53336923.ps1
 770 Q:\Test2018円11円19円\SO_53381881.ps1
1141 Q:\Test2018円12円17円\CR_209811.ps1
1259 Q:\Test2018円12円17円\SU_1385185.ps1

• LotPings: @RobbieDee Sorry for the missing closing brackets, Label or Name are both valid for calculated properties