Question

I want to find any file that can match two regular expressions, for example all files that have at least one of bat, hat, cat as well as the word noun. That would be any file that can match both regular expressions [bhc]at and noun.

The regex parameter to select-string only seems to work on a line-by-line basis. It seems you can pass in multiple patterns delimited by commas (select-string -pattern "[bhc]at","noun") but it matches either, rather than both.

Answer 1

Merging @mjolinor’s single get-content with @JNK’s optimised filtering gives:

dir | ?{ [string](gc $_) | ?{$_ -match "[bhc]at"} | ?{$_ -match "noun"} }

If you don’t mind the repetition, you can pipe the results to select string to view the contexts of these matches:

    | select-string -pattern "[bhc]at","noun" -allmatches