PowerShell – Search against large .csv file(s) for a string

Previously, I had exported log files of considerable size parsing for certain columns of data to multiple .csv files. Now I had wanted a response file with corresponding variable(s) and each entry (i.e. time stamp etc.) searching against one or multiple files. Below had been the process for this search and export. In this example, I had been using Windows 2012.

1. Right-click on the PowerShell icon and select RUN AS ADMINISTRATOR and OPEN.

2. Determine PowerShell version with the following command: $host.version

IMPORTANT: PowerShell 2.0 and above must be used to support the forthcoming commands.

3. Change directory to .csv file(s) location (i.e. c:\logs)

Example:

CD C:\logs

4. Create a directory to place your exported results (i.e. c:\garzafx)

5. Run the following command to export search to .csv file

Get-ChildItem | Get-Content | Select-String -pattern “ellen ripley” | export-csv c:\garzafx\ellen.ripley.csv

a. Get-ChildItem will reference the file or files within the current directory. For my purposes here and the size of the data files, I had referenced few at a time.

b. Get-Content, simply had taken what Get-ChildItem pulled from the aforementioned directory (i.e. C:\logs)

C. Select-string -pattern, This had provided the variable (i.e. ellen ripley)

6. Here had been the export results with time stamp and pattern match for Ellen Ripley.