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Comment by Jestar342 | Hacker News Reader

One difference in usage of PWSH I can't wrap my head around is when I want to do something akin to:

    grep -rl $pattern | $othercommand

So far I've got this (deliberately avoiding aliases for this example) in the above grep's command's stead:

    Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Path * | Select-String $pattern

But I just cannot fathom how to break from the table format to pass the lines to $othercommand.

How does one pass a pwsh list to a single command? Using %{}/For-Each {} wouldn't work because it would invoke $othercommand for each line.

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Since Powershell isn't working on text but on objects, you might just want to use grep. Anyways, this should reproduce the output of grep in powershell:

  Get-ChildItem -Recurse -File | Select-String "$pattern" -List -SimpleMatch -CaseSensitive | Select-Object -ExpandProperty path

You will want to only search in files for this to not ouput some lines of InputStream if there is a match in the actual path. If $pattern is an actual regex you will want to drop SimpleMatch. In case you want some proper powershell objects you might want to pipe this into Get-Item.

Everything in powershell is an object, but sometimes the output format doesn't make it clear. Select-String basically returns a match object with some nested results, but the output formatting makes it awkward to see. Pipe it to

  | format-list *

to investigate it, and you'll see a bunch of members. In this case if what you want is just the matched string, you want to expand the `Matches` property of the object, then expand the value property of each of those. In this case the term 'expand' is key: if you just use `select` it'll return you the property, name and all. Use `-expand` to return the plain array. So something like:

  Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Path * | Select-String $pattern | select -expand matches | select -expand value

which you can then use how you like. An alternate form is

  (Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Path * | Select-String $pattern).Matches.Value

because the . notation for member access works on all items in an array (Matches in this case).

I don't think I entirely understand the question, is $othercommand doing something with all of the lines together?

Yes, for example other command may be (and often is) fzf followed by yet another command to exec on the chosen file.

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