I have seen a lot of confusion recently over the use of Select-String.

One mis-conception is that you need to use Get-Content to pipe the file contents into Select-String. Not so. Select-String will read the file for you.

If you just want to scan the files in a single folder to find a specific string then Select-String can do the work for you

Select-String -Path C:\Test*.txt -Pattern “trial” ““SimpleMatch

If you need to work through a folder structure add get-ChildItem to the pipeline

Get-ChildItem -Path C:\Test -Filter *.txt -Recurse |
Select-String -Pattern “trial” ““SimpleMatch

One line of PowerShell gives you a very powerful way of filtering the files recursively and testing their contents for a given string