As we were developing PowerShell, we knew that we wanted to provide a capability for searching through the help. Unfortunately, we don’t always get to everything, and this is one of those things that we couldn’t get to. However, I still sometimes need to search through the help, so I created this little function to do the search. It searches through the conceptual topics for the string for which I’m looking and with the switch parameter "-all", I search through the descriptions of the cmdlet help as well.
Like most things in PowerShell, it turns out to be pretty simple. Here’s how I would look for help that has the word "process" in it, I use -all to retrieve cmdlet help in addition to the conceptural (about*) topics.
PS> search-help process -all HelpTopic Reference --------- --------- about_arithmetic_operators The command then processes the parameters as it w... about_array .NET Framework. For example, the objects that Get... about_assignment_operators current process. For example, the following comma... about_automatic_variables Contains objects for which an error occurred whil... about_commonparameters the command during processing. This variable is about_environment_variable system path, the number of processors used by the... about_filter processes that begin with the letters a through m... about_foreach displays any processes whose working-set (memory ... about_function filters. The primary difference between the two i... about_location As a result, all commands are processed from this... about_logical_operator When PowerShell processes this statement, it eval... about_object receives the objects from the first command, proc... about_operator fact that PowerShell processes operators in a ver... about_parsing When processing a command, the PowerShell parser ... about_pipeline down the pipeline to the second command. The seco... about_provider Alias ShouldProcess ... about_quoting_rules is passed to the command for processing. Consider... about_shell_variable example, the $PID variable stores the process ID ... about_signing export process. about_switch The keyword "break" indicates that no more proces... about_wildcard in order to return specific results. The process ... default get-help get-process : Displays help about the ... ForEach-Object Performs an operation against each of a set of in... Where-Object Creates a filter that controls which objects will... Get-Process Gets the processes that are running on the local ... Stop-Process Stops one or more running processes. Set-Content Writes or replaces the content in an item with ne... Export-Csv Creates a comma-separated values (CSV) file that ... Sort-Object Sorts objects by property values. Get-TraceSource Gets the Windows PowerShell components that are i...
Here’s the search-help script – as you can see, it’s just a few lines. The interesting bit is the use of Select-Object. With Select-Object, I create custom objects from both about* help and cmdlet help. Select-Object allows me to specify which properties I want, but it also allows me to "rename" the property. This way I can take two disparate bits of information (the bits I get back from Select-String and the bits I get out of the help object) and create objects that will act consistently regardless of their origin.
function Search-Help
{
param ( $pattern, [switch]$all ) $path = “${pshome}\about*.txt” Select-String -list –pattern ${pattern} –path ${path}| select-object @{ n="HelpTopic"; e = {$_.filename -replace ".help.txt"}}, @{n="Reference";e={$_.line.trim()}} if ( $all ) { Get-Help * | where-object { $_.description -match ${pattern}}| select-object @{n="HelpTopic";e={$_.Name}}, @{n="Reference"; e={$_.synopsis}}
} }
I hope this is useful for you!
jim
