Grep for Windows Using FINDSTR

One of the things I miss when on a windows machine is the command line utilities provided on a Unix machine. one of the most missed utilities is grep. As it turns out, Windows has an adequate built-in equivalent, namely findstr. In fact, Windows has several built-in command-line utilities that provide most, if not all, of the functionality of our trusty Unix tools. This article shall serve as the first of many that will describe Windows equivalents to Unix command-line tools.

Source File

For all examples, we shall use the Windows findstr help file listed below.

C:\Documents and Settings\michael>findstr /?

Searches for strings in files.

FINDSTR [/B] [/E] [/L] [/R] [/S] [/I] [/X] [/V] [/N] [/M] [/O] [/P] [/F:file]

        [/C:string] [/G:file] [/D:dir list] [/A:color attributes] [/OFF[LINE]]

        strings [[drive:][path]filename[ ...]]

  /B         Matches pattern if at the beginning of a line.

  /E         Matches pattern if at the end of a line.

  /L         Uses search strings literally.

  /R         Uses search strings as regular ｅxpressions.

  /S         Searches for matching files in the current directory and all

             subdirectories.

  /I         Specifies that the search is not to be case-sensitive.

  /X         Prints lines that match exactly.

  /V         Prints only lines that do not contain a match.

  /N         Prints the line number before each line that matches.

  /M         Prints only the filename if a file contains a match.

  /O         Prints character offset before each matching line.

  /P         Skip files with non-printable characters.

  /OFF[LINE] Do not skip files with offline attribute set.

  /A:attr    Specifies color attribute with two hex digits. See "color /?"

  /F:file    Reads file list from the specified file(/ stands for console).

  /C:string  Uses specified string as a literal search string.

  /G:file    Gets search strings from the specified file(/ stands for console).

  /D:dir     Search a semicolon delimited list of directories

  strings    Text to be searched for.

  [drive:][path]filename

             Specifies a file or files to search.

Use spaces to separate multiple search strings unless the argument is prefixed

with /C.  For example, 'FINDSTR "hello there" x.y' searches for "hello" or

"there" in file x.y.  'FINDSTR /C:"hello there" x.y' searches for

"hello there" in file x.y.

Regular ｅxpression quick reference:

  .        Wildcard: any character

  *        Repeat: zero or more occurances of previous character or class

  ^        Line position: beginning of line

  $        Line position: end of line

  [class]  Character class: any one character in set

  [^class] Inverse class: any one character not in set

  [x-y]    Range: any characters within the specified range

  \x       Escape: literal use of metacharacter x

  \    Word position: end of word

For full information on FINDSTR regular ｅxpressions refer to the online Command

Basic Tasks

Find lines with the word "any" in them

Unix grep:

grep any findstr_help.txt

Output:

.        Wildcard: any character

[class]  Character class: any one character in set

[^class] Inverse class: any one character not in set

[x-y]    Range: any characters within the specified range

Windows findstr:

findstr any findstr_help.txt

Output:

.        Wildcard: any character

[class]  Character class: any one character in set

[^class] Inverse class: any one character not in set

[x-y]    Range: any characters within the specified range

Recursively search a file directory for the word "any" in the files

Unix grep:

grep -R any .

Output is omitted due to size.

Windows findstr:

dir /B /S . | findstr /f:/ any

Output is ommitted due to size.

http://www.michaelmiranda.org/software-development/articles/grepforwindowsusingfindstr