I suspect you haven't read the documentation or tried using PowerShell for any length of time. PowerShell may be bash-like, but it's not bash, does not try to be bash, and won't reward you if you treat it like bash. But it's very orthogonal, clean, and well documented.
For your particular example:
> help grep
Name Category Module Synopsis
---- -------- ------ --------
Out-File Cmdlet Microsoft.PowerShell.U... Sends output to a file.
Select-String Cmdlet Microsoft.PowerShell.U... Finds text in strings and files.
Okay, so Select-String sounds really promising. Let's take a look.
> help select-string
NAME
Select-String
SYNOPSIS
Finds text in strings and files.
SYNTAX
Select-String [-Pattern] [-Path] [-AllMatches] [-CaseSensitive] [-Context
[]] [-Encoding {unicode | utf7 | utf8 | utf32 | ascii | bigendianunicode | default | oem}]
[-Exclude []] [-Include []] [-InformationAction {SilentlyContinue | Stop | Continue |
Inquire | Ignore | Suspend}] [-InformationVariable []] [-List] [-NotMatch] [-Quiet]
[-SimpleMatch] []
Most of those command flags seem really straightfoward to me. Can you be more specific about what was unclear to you? I'd be happy to help.
EDIT: BTW, it's a bit annoying to type Select-String, so it'd be nice if it had an alias. Does it have one?
Well, you can get aliases in PowerShell by typing alias. But that'll give you a wall of text; what you want to do is to quickly search for things that are aliased to Select-String.
There are two ways to do this. First, you can pipe to a GUI that allows directly filtering the results:
> alias | out-gridview
Or, alternatively, we can figure out what objects alias gives us:
> alias | select -first 1 | get-member
Note that we've got a Definition field, and query on that:
> alias | Where-Object { $_.definition -contains 'Select' }
which is a long version of
> alias | ? { $_.definition -contains 'Select' }
And notice that Select-String is aliased to sls by default. Note that I can just reference the column by name, rather than going through some awk/cut fun.
You might be annoyed that Select-String is not aliased to grep. While many commands actually do have multiple aliases to both DOS and Unix equivalents (e.g., Get-ChildItem is aliased to gci, dir, and ls, and Remove-Item has ri, rm, and del as aliases), Select-String works differently enough from grep that it's not a default alias so you're not confused.