PowerShell: how to grep command output?

Question

In PowerShell I have tried:

alias | select-string Alias

This fails even though Alias is clearly in the output. I know this is beca

Answer 1

Your problem is that alias emits a stream of AliasInfo objects, rather than a stream of strings. This does what I think you want.

alias | out-string -stream | select-string Alias

or as a function

function grep {
  $input | out-string -stream | select-string $args
}

alias | grep Alias

When you don't handle things that are in the pipeline (like when you just ran 'alias'), the shell knows to use the ToString() method on each object (or use the output formats specified in the ETS info).