PowerShell Script to Find and Replace for all Files with a Specific Extension

Question

I have several configuration files on Windows Server 2008 nested like such:

C:\Projects\Project_1\project1.config

C:\Projects\Project_2\project2.config

In my configuration I need to do a string replace like such:

<add key="Environment" value="Dev"/>

will become:

<add key="Environment" value="Demo"/>

I thought about using batch scripting, but there was no good way to do this, and I heard that with PowerShell scripting you can easily perform this. I have found examples of find/replace, but I was hoping for a way that would traverse all folders within my C:\Projects directory and find any files that end with the '.config' extension. When it finds one, I want it to replace my string values.

Any good resources to find out how to do this or any PowerShell gurus that can offer some insight?

Answer 1

PowerShell is a good choice ;) It is very easy to enumerate files in given directory, read them and process.

The script could look like this:

Get-ChildItem C:\Projects *.config -recurse |
    Foreach-Object {
        $c = ($_ | Get-Content) 
        $c = $c -replace '<add key="Environment" value="Dev"/>','<add key="Environment" value="Demo"/>'
        [IO.File]::WriteAllText($_.FullName, ($c -join "`r`n"))
    }

I split the code to more lines to be readable for you. Note that you could use Set-Content instead of [IO.File]::WriteAllText, but it adds new line at the end. With WriteAllText you can avoid it.

Otherwise the code could look like this: $c | Set-Content $_.FullName.

Answer 2

Here a first attempt at the top of my head.

$configFiles=get-childitem . *.config -rec
foreach ($file in $configFiles)
{
(Get-Content $file.PSPath) | 
Foreach-Object {$_ -replace "Dev", "Demo"} | 
Set-Content $file.PSPath
}

Answer 3

I would go with xml and xpath:

dir C:\Projects\project_\project.config -recurse | foreach-object{
$wc = [xml](Get-Content $.fullname) $wc.SelectNodes("//add[@key='Environment'][@value='Dev']") | Foreach-Object {$.value = 'Demo'}
$wc.Save($_.fullname)
}