Searching Your Code with Windows PowerShell

I frequently need to search through source code to find references to variable and object names. When I got a new workstation running Windows 7 x64, I wanted to find a search utility that would take full advantage of all the horsepower I had at my fingertips. Previously, I had used Windows Grep, but There didn’t seem to be an x64 version available. After some searching I found a lot of people pointing towards Windows PowerShell.

There are a lot of powerful commands at your disposal in Windows PowerShell, but here is the snippet that I have found to suit my needs so far:

$search_path = "C:\source\"

$search_pattern = "SearchTerm"

# -caseSensitive
clear
Get-ChildItem -recurse -include *.sca, *.prg, *.vca, *.fra $search_path | `
    Select-String -pattern $search_pattern | `
    Format-List -GroupBy Filename -Property LineNumber, Line

If you recognize those file extensions, you can tell I work in Visual FoxPro, which is why I’m not just using Visual Studio to search the source code.

The two statements at the top just declare variables to make it easy for me to change the location and search terms. The actual work occurs in the bottom block, and combines three cmdlets: Get-ChildItem, Select-String, and Format-List .

Get-ChildItem outputs all of the files of the specified extensions (the -Include flag) recursively (the -Recurse flag) through the path provided (the $search_path variable). These files get piped into Select-String , which performs pattern matching (the -Pattern flag) on the contents of each file and outputs any matches. The final piece, Format-List, takes the matches that Select-String found and formats them for display, grouping the results by file (the -GroupBy flag) and displaying the line number and line contents of each match (the -Property flag).

The default output of Format-List is much more verbose, and you can tailor it to show whatever information you find useful, but I’ve found this to be the cleanest display for checking code references. I also have -CaseSensitive stuck in a comment in there in case I want to modify Select-String to do a case sensitive search.

The only other pitfall I ran into was after saving this script and trying to open and run it in the PowerShell ISE, I got an error that that basically said I didn’t have execute permissions. To remedy this, I had to use the Set-ExecutionPolicy cmdlet, which you can read about here. I would definitely recommend reading about this cmdlet before using it, since you basically have to reduce security to get your script working - well, unless you want to sign your own script, but I’m not sure what that involves.