Powershell Count Files By Regex Match on Content

Being a Powershell Winter Scripting Games Top Scorer for both the 2007 and 2008 Scripting Games I have to keep my skills fresh. Never know when you need to whip out an extra dirty little script to count how many T's are in a text file.

Scripting languages always give me a dirty feeling when I get done and look at my code. I'm a fan of what Code Complete describes as the Primary Imperative of Software Engineering; Managing Complexity. Solving something with a scripting language always makes we want to write something using the least amount of characters possible. Comments, descriptive variable names and consistent formatting usually go right out the window along with the ability to come back a month later and figure out what is going on in the script, let alone try and tell a co-worker what is going on.

That being said, here is a tiny powershell script to count files based on a Regex match of their content. Don't worry, I took the time to comment it a little bit and even have some pretty descriptive variable names. It originally was just one line for the specific task I needed to get done. I was looking for the number of xml files with a specific value in a set of directories.

# Create Parameters for our script.
# TODO: Make a helpful usage reply when no parameters supplied.
Param( [String]$path="./",
[String]$filter="*.txt",
[String]$match=$(throw "Regex Pattern required."),
[switch]$searchSubs)

$reg = [regex]$match;

if ( $searchSubs )
{ # Get the files matching the passed in path/filter
dir -path $path -filter $filter -recurse
# Loop through each and look for a match of the Regex.
% {
$in = gc $_.FullName; $reg.Match($in).Groups[1].Value
} group #Group the Values.
}
else
{ dir -path $path -filter $filter
% {
$in = gc $_.FullName; $reg.Match($in).Groups[1].Value
} group
}

Here is some sample usage:

./FileMatch.ps1 -path c:\somewebsite\fileUpload -filter *.xml -match 'field value="(.*?)" name="blah' -searchSubs

You can even mix up the parameters if you want. Powershell Rocks!

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