How can I delete a line from a file in Powershell?

Question

I looked online and found a command similar to this

Get-Content .\aws_hosts | Where-Object {$_ -notmatch '([^\.0-9])'} | Set-Content out.txt

All that did was copy the line to an out.txt file. I'm trying to figure out how to delete a line from the .\aws_hosts file.

In my aws_hosts file, I want to specifically delete the IP address on line 2 and not the [servers] line

[servers]
35.35.35.25

Here's the linux version of what I'm trying to do (It's from a Terraform tutorial and they're using Linux, I just can't figure out how to do it using Powershell)

sed -i '/^[0-9]/d' aws_hosts

Are you looking to ignore specifically IP addresses or numeric digits and literal dots? — Santiago Squarzon
– Santiago Squarzon, Commented May 3, 2022 at 0:46
@SantiagoSquarzon I got a command to write an IP address to a file so I can use it for a service like Ansible. This happens when I create my virtual machine, but when I delete this virtual machine I need it to delete the ip address from the file and I just need to provide a powershell command to remove that IP address from the file — MP32
– MP32, Commented May 3, 2022 at 0:55

mklement0 · Accepted Answer · 2022-05-03 00:58:26Z

1

Just use the same regex as you would with sed:

Get-Content .\aws_hosts |
  Where-Object { $_ -notmatch '^[0-9]' } | 
    Set-Content out.txt

For smallish files (which most text files are), you can simplify to:

@(Get-Content .\aws_hosts) -notmatch '^[0-9]' | Set-Content out.txt

This simplified approach - due to reading the entire input file in full up front - also allows you to write the results back to the same file, as sed -i would.

edited May 3, 2022 at 0:58

answered May 3, 2022 at 0:53

mklement0

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