Powershell: Search directories and subdirectories for files with specific content

I’d like to share a small PowerShell script that scans all subdirectories for specific files (for example, *.yaml and *.yml) and searches them for a specific string (e.g., “ansible.builtin.template”). The result is returned with the location (name and path of the file, and line number of the search string in the file).

What it does:

• Recursively searches all .yaml and .yml files starting from the current directory (.).
• Searches for the string service time in each file.
• Prints the file, line number, and line contents for each match.

# String to search for
$searchterm= "ansible.builtin.template"

# Search all .yaml and .yml files recursively
Get-ChildItem -Path . -Recurse -Include *.yaml, *.yml -File | ForEach-Object {
    $Datei = $_.FullName
    # Search the file contents line by line
    Select-String -Path $Datei -Pattern $searchterm| ForEach-Object {
        [PSCustomObject]@{
            Datei     = $_.Path
            Zeile     = $_.LineNumber
            Inhalt    = $_.Line.Trim()
        }
    }
}

Sometimes I want to save my results to a file and explore them further. To save the results to a CSV file, adapt the script as follows:

$results= Get-ChildItem -Path . -Recurse -Include *.yaml, *.yml -File | ForEach-Object {
    $Datei = $_.FullName
    Select-String -Path $Datei -Pattern $Suchbegriff | ForEach-Object {
        [PSCustomObject]@{
            Datei     = $_.Path
            Zeile     = $_.LineNumber
            Inhalt    = $_.Line.Trim()
        }
    }
}

$results | Export-Csv -Path "searchresults.csv" -NoTypeInformation -Encoding UTF8