How to search a string in multiple files and retur

Question

I have started learning powershell a couple of days ago, and I couldn't find anything on google that does what I need so please bear with my question.

I have been asked to replace some text strings into multiple files. I do not necessarily know the extension of the possible target files and I don't know their location either. So far I have managed to recursively browse into the directory (get-ChildItem -recurse) and find the string I was looking for with get-content and select-string:

Get-ChildItem -recurse | Get-Content | Select-String -pattern "dummy"

The problem is, I can see the occurences of the text I am looking for, but I don't know how to tell PS to return the path and the name for every matching files as well.

How can I get the name and location of the files that contains the expression I am looking for?

Answer 1

To keep the complete file details in resulting array you could use a slight modification of the answer posted by vikas368 (which didn't seem to work well with the ISE autocomplete):

Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Where-Object { $_ | Select-String -Pattern "dummy" }

or in short:

ls -r | ?{ $_ | Select-String -Pattern "dummy" }

Answer 2

This will display a list of the full path to each file that contains the search string:

foreach ($file in Get-ChildItem | Select-String -pattern "dummy" | Select-Object -Unique path) {$file.path}

Note that it doesn't display a header above the results and doesn't display the lines of text containing the search string. All it tells you is where you can find the files that contain the string.

Answer 3

If you search into one directory, you can do it:

select-string -Path "c:\temp\*.*" -Pattern "result"  -List | select Path