Powershell grep: Count occurences of string in files using PowerShell

Search and count string occurrences in files using PowerShell’s Select-String, with examples for CSV parsing, pattern matching, and line/word counting.

Display occurences

Display occurences of lines ending with “,2018” in all CSV of a folder

select-string *.csv -pattern ",2018$"

Display occurences of “{a word},{some digits}” in all CSV files in a folder and its subfolders (recursive version)

select-string -rec *.csv -pattern "\w+,\d+"

Count occurences

Template to count occurences

(Get-Content my_file | select-string -pattern "my string").length
(gc my_file | select-string -pattern "my string").length # gc is a Get-Content alias

Count the number of functions in a PHP Class file

(gc MyClass.php | select-string -pattern " function ").length

Count the number of function is all Java files in the actual folder

(gc *.php | select-string -pattern " function ").length

Count Lines, Characters & Words

gc file.xml | Measure-Object –Line # Count Lines
gc file.xml | Measure-Object –Character # Count Characters
gc file.xml | Measure-Object –Word # Count Words

head & tail

gc file.xml -head 10 # first 10 lines (head -n 10)
gc file.xml -tail 10 # last 10 lines (tail -n 10)
gc file.xml -tail 10 -wait # last 10 lines and keep open (tail -f)
[char[]](gc file.xml -Encoding byte -TotalCount 200) -join '' # first 200 char (head -c 200)