Avoid line breaks when using out-file

Question

Hi everyone,

I'm getting a little frustrated on a little PowerShell script I'm writing.

Basically I loop through text files to check every line against an array of regular expression patterns. The result gets piped to the out-file cmdlet which appends it to another text file.

Get-ChildItem $logdir -Recurse -Include @('*.txt') | Get-Content | ForEach-Object { 
Select-String $patterns -InputObject $_ | Out-File $csvpath -Append -Width 1000 }

My problem is that I can't get out-file to omit those additional line breaks it creates in the file behind $csvpath (three after each line). I could use .NET framework classes to achieve the same thing but I'd rather stick to pure PowerShell ;-)

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Kevin

Answer 1

Keep in mind that Select-String outputs MatchInfo objects and not strings - as is shown by this command:

gci $logdir -r *.txt | gc | select-string $patterns | format-list *

You are asking for an implicit rendering of the MatchInfo object to string before being output to file. For some reason I don't understand, this is causing additional blank lines to be output. You can fix this by specifying that you only want the Line property output to the file e.g.:

gci $logdir -r *.txt | gc | select-string $patterns | %{$_.Line} | 
    Out-File $csvpath -append -width 1000

Answer 2

Why don't you use Add-Content?

gci $logdir -rec *.txt | gc | select-string $pattern | add-content $csvpath

You don't need to specify the width and -append switch, the file size is not doubled by default (although you can specify encoding) and it seems that there is no problem with the empty lines like you have.