Introduction

This article provides a Powershell Script to search for a specific string in multiple log files using a PowerShell script.

Need for this script

Consider a scenario where you have thousands of .log files and you need to find whether a specific string pattern is available or not in each of the log files. PowerShell becomes handy otherwise you may end up searching the string for days.

The following piece of code gets input from the user on the log files location path and the string to be searched for and loops through all the log files under the given location and searches for the specific string. An output file (FileContainingString.txt) with the details of the log file that has the specific string is generated and placed under the same location where the script is placed.

  1. $path = read-host "Enter the path for the log files "
  2. $Searchstring = read-host "Enter the string to be searched "
  3. $Logs = Get-ChildItem -path $path -recurse -include *.log
  4. foreach($Log in $Logs)
  5. {
  6. $StringExist = Select-String -Path $log.fullname -pattern $Searchstring
  7. if($StringExist)
  8. {
  9. write-host "String found in " $Log.name -fore green
  10. $log.name | out-file $scriptbase\FileContainingString.txt -append
  11. }
  12. else
  13. {
  14. write-host "String not found in " $Log.name -fore cyan
  15. }
  16. }
Complete Code
  1. $LogTime = Get-Date -Format yyyy-MM-dd_hh-mm
  2. $LogFile = ".\SearchStringPatch-$LogTime.rtf"
  4. # Add SharePoint PowerShell Snapin
  7. if ( (Get-PSSnapin -Name Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null )
    {
  8. Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell
  9. }
  11. $scriptBase = split-path $SCRIPT:MyInvocation.MyCommand.Path -parent
  12. Set-Location $scriptBase
  14. #Deleting any .rtf files in the scriptbase location
  15. $FindRTFFile = Get-ChildItem $scriptBase\*.* -include *.rtf
  16. if($FindRTFFile)
  17. {
  18. foreach($file in $FindRTFFile)
  19. {
  20. remove-item $file
  21. }
  22. }
  24. $TestPath = test-path -path $scriptbase\FileContainingString.txt
  25. if($testpath)
  26. {
  27. remove-item $scriptbase\FileContainingString.txt
  28. }
  30. start-transcript $logfile
  32. $path = read-host "Enter the path for the log files "
  33. $Searchstring = read-host "Enter the string to be searched "
  34. $Logs = Get-ChildItem -path $path -recurse -include *.log
  35. foreach($Log in $Logs)
  36. {
  37. $StringExist = Select-String -Path $log.fullname -pattern $Searchstring
  38. if($StringExist)
  39. {
  40. write-host "String found in " $Log.name -fore green
  41. $log.name | out-file $scriptbase\FileContainingString.txt -append
  42. }
  43. else
  44. {
  45. write-host "String not found in " $Log.name -fore cyan
  46. }
  47. }
  48. stop-transcript
Execution procedure



Conclusion

Thus this article outlines how to search for a specific string pattern in thousands of log files using a PowerShell script.