Get-NumberedContent

One of the reasons I enjoy Twitter is that it exposes me to PowerShell ideas and enthusiasts beyond my immediate circle. I came across a blog post from David Longnecker about a short function to display file content in a numbered format. Basically taking Get-Content and adding a line number to the output. Well I’m like a raccoon drawn by shiny objects and was easily distracted enough to add my own variations on the idea.

Since David was using Write-Host, I decided to take advantage of the color opportunities. Since I typically use Get-Content to quickly look at scripts, I decided that if the line began with a comment character, to display it in Green. But I do more than PowerShell, so I added code to see if the file was a script file (.bat, .cmd, .wsf, .vbs or .ps1). If so then it checks for the beginning comment character. Perhaps you’d like to see what I’m talking about.

Function Get-NumberedContent {

    param ([string] $filename=$profile)

    If (Test-Path $filename) {

        $counter = 0

        get-content $filename | foreach {

            $counter++

            #default font color

            $fcolor="White"

            #determine if file is a script

            if ((Get-Item $filename).extension -match "bat|vbs|cmd|wsf|ps1") {

                #determine if line is a comment. If so we want to write it in Green

                if ($_.Trim().StartsWith("#") -or `

                    $_.Trim().StartsWith("'") -or `

                    $_.Trim().StartsWith("::") -or `

                    $_.Trim().ToLower().StartsWith("rem")) {

                   $fcolor="Green"

                }

            }

            #write a 4 digit line number the | bar an.d then the line of text from the file

            #trimming off any trailing spaces

            Write-Host ("{0:d4} | {1}" -f $counter,$_.TrimEnd()) -foregroundcolor $fcolor

             }

    }

    else {

        Write-Warning "Failed to find $filename"

        }

 } #end function

The other change I made was formatting the line number so that it is always 4 digits with leading zeros.  I rarely look at files with more than 10K lines with Get-Content so this seems reasonable.  Oh..I also added minor error handling if you try to look at a file that doesn’t exist and the function defaults to your PowerShell profile.

I gave my function an alias of gnc. Here’s some sample output:

I can think of a few more enhancements but I have to get something done today!