Search for RegEx string in files and return ONLY file name, path and string

Question

i am kinda stuck with this search for Regex string. The scenario is as follows:

• I have a bunch of files of certain extension (*.tlt) with random content
• All the files are across the subfolders of BETA folder on drive F:
• Each one of the files has at least one Revision 1.234 somewhere in the content. (sometimes multiple times - only the first appearance is important)

This is what I have so far:

$files = gci f:\beta\ -Include "*.tlt" -Recurse
$results = $files |
           Select-String -Pattern 'Revision:.+.{1}[.]\d{1,3}'|
           ForEach-Object { $_.Matches } |
           select Value |
           Format-Table -GroupBy Filename

What I need is a PowerShell script that searches through the files and returns the list of files with the full path and ONLY the Revision 1.234 but not the whole line.

Answer 1

You were close, but you inevitably need to loop through your files. Note -Filter is significantly faster than -Include since it doesn't collect every object before filtering.

$fileList = Get-ChildItem -Path F:\beta -Filter *.tlt -Recurse
$results = foreach ($file in $fileList)
{
    $find = $file | Select-String -Pattern '(Revision:.+?\.\d{1,3})'
    if ($find)
    {
        @{
            Path = $file.FullName
            Rev  = $find.Matches.Groups[0].Value
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

A single-pipeline solution is possible with the help of calculated properties :

Get-ChildItem f:\beta -Filter *.tlt -Recurse | 
  Select-String -List -Pattern 'Revision:.+?\.\d{3}' |
    Select-Object @{ n='FullName'; e='Path' }, @{ n='Revision'; e={ $_.Matches.Value } } 

Sample output:

FullName                              Revision
--------                              --------
/Users/jdoe/foo.tlt                   Revision: 1.234
/Users/jdoe/sub/bar.tlt               Revision: 10.235

• As mentioned in TheIncorrigible1's answer , using -Filter performs much better than using -Include , because -Filter filters at the source (lets the filesystem provider do the filtering) rather than collecting all file-info objects first and then letting PowerShell do the filtering.

• Select-String -List limits matching in each input file to the first match.

• Each match output by Select-String is a [Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.MatchInfo] instance, which contains rich metadata about each match, such as .Path with the full input filename, and .Matches with information about what the regex ( -Pattern ) matched - this metadata is used to populate the output custom objects created by Select-Object via the aforementioned calculated properties.