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Comment by cssmoo | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, and I say this with a massive cringe, after 20 years of Unix I'm more productive with PS in a couple of months! It's quite refreshingly easy to use and I genuinely had no idea how much time I was wasting on parsing streams.

Now I feel horrible for revealing my dirty secret :(

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What do you use for grep?

I tried using Powershell and did a few things with it, but while it is a great shell, the lack of good tools like grep prevented me from being really productive.

`select-string` or it's alias `sst`. I find myself filtering collections of objects far more frequently then grepping lines when using powershell.

I've ended up with

Select-String "pattern" -Path file.txt | ForEach-Object { Write-Output $_.Line } | Out-File t.txt

Slightly Heath Robinson, but by default PS will truncate lines to terminal width, even when writing to a file, which is a disaster for any kind of subsequent machine processing.

For the uninitiated this looks completely barbaric, but makes a whole lot of sense when you consider that PS is built around an object-based pipeline. 'Select-String' in PS doesn't actually return a string, but a 'MatchInfo' object, which contains more properties -- 'linenumber', 'context', etc, as well as the 'line' property which contains the actual matched lines as strings. The default output from any part of the pipeline is a human-readable/terminal-display-compatible representation of the object's commonly used properties, thus the truncation.

As an aside, you can replace the foreach with select-object for an efficiency gain:

    sls "Pattern" file.txt | select -exp line | out-file t.txt

You also don't technically need to go through Select-String if all you care about is the line itself:

    (gc file.txt) -match "Pattern" | Out-File t.txt

Comparison operators that get an array as their left argument return the items where the comparison returns true.

Today, I learned "Heath Robinson" is British English for "Rube Goldberg"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Heath_Robinson

You could also use either of these:

  (Select-String "pattern" -Path file.txt).Line > t.txt
  Select-String "Pattern" -Path file.txt | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Line > t.txt

Or equivalent to the second example but with shortcuts:

  sls pattern -path file.txt | select -exp line > t.txt

Default Windows shell also has `findstr`, which works very similarly to grep. It's also quite fast.

I use `where` for finding stuff, but that's based on structure rather than scraping.

Buts its not just the shell, its ps, kill, convert, ffmpeg... do you feel like you can do most stuff you do on linux in PS?

Installing ffmpeg and convert on Windows (without cygwin even) is trivial.

It looks like PowerShell even has kill (as an alias to Stop-Process) and ps (as an alias to Get-Process).

I don't like PowerShell, but I certainly wouldn't be quick to suggest that it is missing features.

Yeah, I think the object pipeline is very nice.

You're a .Net developer who wrote a C# framework back in 2004 and consistently posts about how great Windows is and how poor Linux is.

At a wild guess I'd say that's why you're "more productive with PS in a couple of months".

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