Searching for Files & Text

Searching is one of the most powerful capabilities of any command-line shell. This section covers the PowerShell equivalents of the indispensable Linux tools find (for finding files) and grep (for finding text within files).

PowerShell’s approach leverages its object-oriented nature:

1. Finding Files: Instead of a separate find command, PowerShell expands the functionality of Get-ChildItem (ls) with parameters like -Recurse and -Filter.
2. Finding Text: The grep equivalent is Select-String. The common pattern is to first get a collection of files and then pipe them to Select-String to perform the search.

This section will detail both of these core scenarios.