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

Brandon picture Brandon · May 14, 2010 · Viewed 140.4k times · Source

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

Robben_Ford_Fan_boy picture Robben_Ford_Fan_boy · May 14, 2010

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
}