How to find and replace the word in a text file using PowerShell?

To search for the word in PowerShell and replace it in the file we will use the string operation. In fact, the Get-Content command in PowerShell is used to read almost any type of file content. In this article, we are considering one text file as shown below.

Get-Content C:\Temp\TestFile.txt

Output

PS C:\> Get-Content C:\Temp\TestFile.txt
# In case of linux, networkInterface names are of the form eth*
# In Windows, please use the network full name from Device Manager
networkInterfaces: ["Microsoft Hyper-V Network Adapter"
]

overrideMetricsUsingScriptFile: false

scriptTimeoutInSec: 60

scriptFiles:
- osType: windows
filePath: monitors/NetworkMonitor/scripts/windows-metrics.bat
- osType: unixBase
filePath: monitors/NetworkMonitor/scripts/unix-base-metrics.sh

The above output is the content of the file and we are going to work with it. We need to find the NetWorkMonitor word and replace it with “Active”. Please note the above file is the text file so we don’t need to convert it to the string but if there are any other extensions you may need to convert the output to a string using .ToString() command or Out-String method before performing any operation.

Now, we will find the requested string first, and let’s check how many lines we need to replace using Select-String cmdlet.

(Get-Content C:\Temp\TestFile.txt) | Select-String -Pattern "NetworkMonitor"

Output

PS C:\> (Get-Content C:\Temp\TestFile.txt) | Select-String -Pattern "NetworkMonitor"
   filePath: monitors/NetworkMonitor/scripts/windows-metrics.bat
   filePath: monitors/NetworkMonitor/scripts/unix-base-metrics.sh

We found out there are two lines that have the “NetworkMonitor” word. We need to replace that word with the following command. You can also store Get-Content output in a variable and perform operation on it.

(Get-Content C:\Temp\TestFile.txt) -replace "NetworkMonitor","Active"

Output

PS C:\> (Get-Content C:\Temp\TestFile.txt) -replace "NetworkMonitor","Active"
# In case of linux, networkInterface names are of the form eth*
# In Windows, please use the network full name from Device Manager
networkInterfaces: ["Microsoft Hyper-V Network Adapter"
]

overrideMetricsUsingScriptFile: false

scriptTimeoutInSec: 60

scriptFiles:
- osType: windows
filePath: monitors/Active/scripts/windows-metrics.bat
- osType: unixBase
filePath: monitors/Active/scripts/unix-base-metrics.sh

The above command replaced the file content but it is not stored yet so to save the updated file, we will use the Set-Content and the final code would be,

(Get-Content C:\Temp\TestFile.txt) -replace "NetworkMonitor","Active" | Set-Content
C:\Temp\Testfile.txt -Verbos

You can also choose a different path to save the file. If the file is read-only then use -Force parameter with Set-Content cmdlet.