Powershell objects in a directory are being merged into InputStream

Question

I am attempting to write a powershell script to loop through an entire directory structure and provide the filename, path, and line number of any potentially sensitive information that is contained in the file. When I run the code below, it looks like all of the individual objects in the directory are merged into one called inputstream. Why is this happening?

Code:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Get-Content -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Select-String -Pattern "key.=" | Format-Table FullName, Path, LineNumber, Pattern;

Output:

FullName Path        LineNumber Pattern
-------- ----        ---------- -------
         InputStream       1653 key.=  
         InputStream       2550 key.=  
         InputStream       3405 key.=  
         InputStream       4302 key.=  
         InputStream       4584 key.= 

Answer 1

Select-String is reporting the object it was working on correctly. You piped file contents, via Get-Content to the cmdlet. It was not a path to file so it does not know where that data came from. So it is telling you that InputStream was the source. This is corroborated via Microsoft:

The default output of Select-String is a MatchInfo object, which includes detailed information about the matches. The information in the object is useful when you are searching for text in files, because MatchInfo objects have properties such as Filename and Line. When the input is not from the file, the value of these parameters is InputStream.

^{emphasis mine}

For what you are looking for you would need to change your logic slightly.

Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Select-String -Pattern "key.=" | Select Path, LineNumber, Pattern

Select-String does accept file paths via the pipeline so using that you can get the results you are expecting. I also dropped Format-Table as that can cause you heart ache later and FullName is not a property returned by Select-String

Warning that by default Select-String supports regex and you have a regex control character in that string. Use -SimpleMatch if you don't intend to use regex.