Sensitive word search with powershell - powershell

Question

I am somewhat new to PowerShell so any help I would appreciate.
I am trying to put a PS script together so that I can search a file for sensitive words before transferring it from one network to another. Like 'Classified' and multiple other words that I can add to a word bank in a text file vice updating the code every time
Right now I am forced to use PS 2 windows 7 and server 2008
Select-String -Path e:\transfer_folder\*.* -pattern Classified,restricted
Then I can get an output for any hits on the list of words so that I can find them. I am trying to speed up my searching through hundreds of pages of documents with what I like to call a dirty word search so I do not put something that should not go on the wrong network.

Answer 1

You've got the right idea. The -Pattern tack in powershell can usually be called on to work with regular expressions. If you've never worked with regular expressions, take a look at this beginner's guide to using regex pattern matching. What you probably want is a set of variables that you can use to dynamically pick out those sensitive keywords.
The short and simple answer is that you want to use a pipe to separate your options for pattern, and pass it in as a string.
Select-String -Path e:\transfer_folder\*.* -pattern "Classified|Restricted"
Also, you might want to think about doing this at the file level rather than just importing all of your stuff in willynilly like that. I would go for something like:
$files = #(Get-ChildItem -Path E:\transfer_folder\ -Filter "*.txt|*.etc").FullName
(The # symbol means that you get your output as an array. The .FullName means that you're only selecting the FullName field from the object that's being produced by the command.)
Then you can process each file individually, like:
Foreach ($file in $files) {
Write-Host "Processing $file"
echo (Select-String -Path $file -Pattern $pattern)
}
One of the reasons that I love powershell is how comparatively easy it is to perform these types of matching operations. If you dig into Regex, you'll notice that you can represent "OR" as "|". So you have two options to do this logically:
Just hard write it out
$pattern = "Classified|Forbidden|Death|Danger"
Do it dynamically
Scripting is all about not having to do things more than once, right? So you'll probably want to encapsulate this in a function or something. Or maybe you want to get your words from a text file? You can be like:
(might take some tweaking)
function Get-ForbiddenWords ([string[]]$words, [string]$folder) {
ForEach ($word in $words) {
$pattern += "$word|"
}
#remove trailing pipe
$pattern -replace ".$"
$files = #(Get-ChildItem -Path $folder -Filter "*.txt|*.etc").FullName
Foreach ($file in $files) {
Write-Host "Processing $file"
echo (Select-String -Path $file -Pattern $pattern)
}
}
Now you can put this in your powershell profile and invoke it with
Get-ForbiddenWords -words secret dangerous whatever -folder E:\transfer_folder\