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:\Test\2018\12\17\CR_209811.ps1
Enter extension   : ps1
Enter hunt string : ::Now
Size Path
---- ----
 878 Q:\Test\2018\09\18\SO_52381514.ps1
 677 Q:\Test\2018\11\16\SO_53336923.ps1
 770 Q:\Test\2018\11\19\SO_53381881.ps1
1141 Q:\Test\2018\12\17\CR_209811.ps1
1259 Q:\Test\2018\12\17\SU_1385185.ps1