this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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No grep though as far as I could find... There was a similar cmdlet IIRC, but it was extremely limited and didn't work well (this was years ago though)
The idea with powershell isn't to be a text parser - so grep doesn't really work. When you pass things through pipes, it's a full object with multiple properties, and those you can filter with either simple expressions like
select-object [-property]or with more complex expressions: https://4sysops.com/archives/add-a-calculated-property-with-select-object-in-powershell/Fair, but very very very often (unless you are a full time daily user of the commandlet and all objects you may run into or have a photographic memory) you don't know the actual specific property or object exact verbatim and have to rely on a very quick search to remember that one object you used 3 months ago once that you need now for example. Or you want to see where/if something is referenced in another subset of programs like a specific IP, another program, a resource taken up, etc...
That is mostly what grep is used for: discovery and reference, which powershell I don't think has a substitute for so instead you have to sort through documentation and forums.
Not trying to be difficult, but that's what
get-memberis for - it'll dump all the properties for a given object.I get it - it's way different from bash - speaking as someone who has been using Linux since Debian Hamm. Side note, net installers over dialup really sucked.
I was originally forced to use powershell when I joined up with a virtualization team for work and they used PowerCLI.
It was bonkers how easy it was to get reproducible scripts bundled up for the more junior engineers.
It’s really useful too. You can either pipe in text or for example Get-ChildItem a directory of files and it will parse them all. As usual it returns a helpful object with properties like line number.