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.