A few weeks ago I posted a way to use PowerShell to find in files. This is just an extension of that post to show how you might open the results of your find in a program.

Try this out:

dir -include *.vb -recurse | select-string "text to search for" | % { notepad $_.Path }

If you've got a lot of Visual Basic files that contain "text to search for", you may end up with a lot of instances of notepad open. At work, I use UltraEdit, so I typically would open my files using uedit32 so that all of the results get opened in tabs. You could do the same with Notepad++ or any other program.

I haven't really used PowerShell for much production work, but it has already made me for more productive than I used to be.

While I'm at it, I'll share another nice one-liner that Kerry shared with me to ngen all assemblies in a directory:

dir *.dll | % { C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\ngen.exe $_.fullname}

The web has been busy with news about .NET 3.0 going RTM, along with Office 2007, Vista, etc. But some other news that hasn't received quite as much publicity is news regarding Sysinternals at Microsoft. There were a couple of posts today that I thought were very interesting.

The first post is about the move from the original Sysinternals site over to Microsoft. I think the best part of the announcement is the focus on letting the "community demand help drive [their] priorities." A few of the comments have been negative regarding the decision to not post the source code to the tools, but that is the only negative thing that I can see in the post. Besides, if people want the source enough, maybe Microsoft will put it back out again. They listened when people complained about the Vista EULA didn't they?

The second post is even better news. In addition to some new releases of some great tools from Sysinternals (mostly to support Vista), a new tool has been released called Process Monitor! Process Monitor takes all of the functionality provided by RegMon and FileMon and combines them with even more information such as information about threads! If you're worried that it will put too much into one place because it was nice to focus only on registry or file access, don't because with the click of a button, you can tell it to only display registry changes, file changes, or thread changes. If you want to get straight to the main Process Monitor page, it is here.

Here's a screenshot of Process Monitor in action:

Unrelated to this post, but I used the Snipping Tool in Vista to get this screenshot. It works pretty well.

I haven't posted anything on PowerShell in a while so here's something that's useful.

Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Include *.* | Select-String "text to search for"

Or, if you like things a little more abbreviated, try this:

dir -r -i *.* | Select-String "text to search for"

Select-String is a cmdlet that will search files or strings, sort of like grep in Unix or findstr in cmd.exe. If you use the Get-ChildItem cmdlet, you can specify the -Recurse switch to retrieve subdirectories and the -Include switch will only include the file types that you specify. Then you can pipe it over to Select-String.

Pretty nifty if you're wanting to do some quick file searches.

Check out this PowerShell in Action book excerpt. It gives a good overview on file manipulation from PowerShell and also introduced me to using the Get-ChildItem command and piping the output to Select-String.

Before I began using PowerShell, I had been using a small cmd file called ff.cmd that used the following:

findstr /p /s /i /c:%1 %2

Then I could type things like:

ff "text to search for" .\*.*

But PowerShell is so much cooler now