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

This approach works well:

gci C:\Projects *.config -recurse | ForEach {
  (Get-Content $_ | ForEach {$_ -replace "old", "new"}) | Set-Content $_ 
}
  • Change "old" and "new" to their corresponding values (or use variables).
  • Don't forget the parenthesis -- without which you will receive an access error.

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.


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
}