Quick and Dirty: Parsing logs with PowerShell

Recently I needed to parse a large number of SharePoint log files looking for particular strings. The strings I was looking for indicted errors that required further investigation.

There are a number of tools for doing this sort of activity. In this case, I choose to use PowerShell, because of the speed with which I could accomplish this task. It took me less than 5 minutes to write and test the script. And it saved me a lot of time parsing the log files!

Using the PowerShell script, I can quickly change my queries, re-run my queries, export results, and most importantly, query large numbers of log files quickly.

Here's the code I used.

# Set the path to the log files            
$path = "C:\Temp\Logs"            
# Get a collection of all the log files (anything ending in .log)            
$files = Get-ChildItem -Path $path -Filter "*.log"            
# Pipe the collection of log files to the ForEach-Object cmdlet             
# (the alias of ForEach-Object is %)            
$files | %{            
    # Call the OpenText method, to return a System.IO.StreamReader object            
    $file = $_.OpenText();            
    # Record the current line number (to use in the console output)            
    $lineNum = 1;            
    Write-Host "Checking file"$_.Name -f Yellow;            
    # Use the EndOfStream method (which returns true when you have reach the end            
    # of the file), read each line of the file.              
    while($file.EndOfStream -ne $true)            
    {            
        # Read the next line in the file            
        $line = $file.ReadLine();                    
        if($line -ne $null)            
        {            
            # Use the String ToLower and Contains methods to check for occurances            
            # of the strings (or values) you need to check the file for            
            # In this example, I'm looking for any instances of the text "error" or "exception"            
            if($line.ToLower().Contains("error") -or $line.ToLower().Contains("exception"))            
            {            
                # If the current lines contains a match, write the line number            
                # and line text out to the console            
                Write-Host "Line: $lineNum " -NoNewline -ForegroundColor Green;            
                Write-Host $line -f Red;            
            }            
        }             
        # Increment the line number            
        $lineNum++;                   
    }            
}