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How to Append Data to a Text File Using PowerShell

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 Here’s we can discuss on how to add text to the end of a text file using the Add-Content cmdlet using PowerShell.  In our example let’s add “This is the last line” to the end of a file using add-content cmdlet to append data to a text file.

Add-Content "C:\dotnet-helpers\DummyfiletoDelete.txt" "This is the last line"

The above example above adds the text to the last line of the text, it doesn’t actually create a new line. We can use an escape character to tell PowerShell to add a carriage return, new line… while appending the text in existing file.

Escape characters:

‘n — New line
‘t — Horizontal tab
‘’ — Single quote
‘” — Double quote
‘0 — Null
‘a — Alert
‘b — Backspace
‘r — Carriage return

Append Text using Escape characters:

Add-Content -Path "C:\dotnet-helpers\DummyfiletoDelete.txt" -Value "`r`nThis is the last line".

The above example append the “This is the last line” as a new line at end of the text file with help of ‘n and’ r

Add-Content -Path "C:\dotnet-helpers\DummyfiletoDelete.txt" -Value "This is the last line added from $env:computername system"

 

 OUTPUT:

 

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Reading from Text Files With PowerShell

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PowerShell offers a number of different ways to manage the variety of text files. Here we learn how to retrieve text from text files and how to find text in text files, all through PowerShell cmdlets.

How To Retrieve Text From Text Files

You can use the powershell Get-Content cmdlet which is used to retrieve all text from a text file specified by the Path parameter.

Get-content -Path "C:\dotnet-helpers\BLOG\TestFile.txt"

Executing the above cmdlet, You’ll see that the result was the entire contents of TestFile.txt. If you just wanted to see a particular line number? By default, Get-Content reads all the line in a text file and creates an array as its output with each line of the text as an element in that array.In this case, the array index number is equal to the text file line number. So we can get the each line of the txt file by using the array index number.

$TxtContent = Get-content -Path "C:\dotnet-helpers\BLOG\TestFile.txt"
$TxtContent.GetType()
$TxtContent[0]
$TxtContent[2]

OUTPUT:

IsPublic IsSerial Name BaseType 
-------- -------- ---- -------- 
True True Object[] System.Array 

This is test text file
Thanks for reading this posts.

In the above example, the result of Get-Content is a type of System.Array and that by using index numbers in brackets you can get the value of text file. The index is start from Zero.

How To Find Text In Text Files

There are a many different ways to do this but the we can use Where-Object cmdlet which will be the easilest way. The Where-Object cmdlet is a popular cmdlet that allows you to “filter out” various information from the output of other cmdlets. When using Where-Object we must use the $_ variable and this is a special variable in PowerShell known as the pipeline variable.

Get-content -Path "C:\dotnet-helpers\BLOG\testfile.txt" | Where-Object {$_ -like '*test*'}

OUTPUT:

This is test text file
Will test this file by using Get-Content cmdlet

From the above script, the Where cmdlet find the lines which contain the text “test” from the txt file (found 2 matches) and gives as output.

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How to Delete a Folder or File using PowerShell

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Use PowerShell to Delete a Single File or Folder

Before start executing the Delete powershell command we need to make sure you are logged in to the server or PC with an account that has full access to the objects you want to delete.

# Using PowerShell commnads to delete a file
Remove-Item -Path "C:\dotnet-helpers\DummyfiletoDelete.txt"

The above command will excute and delete the “DummyfiletoDelete.txt” file which present inside the “C:\dotnet-helpers” location.

Use PowerShell to Delete all File and Folders inside the folder

We can also use wildcard ‘*’ characters to remove multiple items. For example, this command removes all the files in “C:\dotnet-helpers\*.*”

# Using PowerShell commnads to delete all file
Remove-Item -Path "C:\dotnet-helpers\*.*"


# Using PowerShell commnads to delete all file and folders
Remove-Item -Path "C:\dotnet-helpers\*.*" -recurse

Recurse drills down and finds lots more files. The –recurse parameter will allow PowerShell to remove any child items without asking for permission. Additionally, the –force parameter can be added to delete hidden or read-only files.

Using -Force command to delete files force fully

# Using PowerShell commnads to delete all file force fully
Remove-Item -Path "C:\dotnet-helpers\*.*" -Force

The above command will delete all hidden or read-only files from the location “C:\dotnet-helpers\”