Is there a Pattern Matching Utility like GREP in Windows

Question

Is there a similar utility to grep available from the Windows Command Prompt  or is there a third party tool for it

User · Answer

If you have to use bare Windows  then in addition to the Powershell option noted above  you can use VBScript  which has decent RegEx support   MS also has a decent scripting area on Technet with a ton of examples for administrators

User · Answer

In the windows reskit there is a utility called  qgrep    You may have it on your box already    -   It also comes with the  tail  command  thank god

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Grep for Windows by GnuWin Project  2014-10-02  It s outdated  see comments below

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You have obviously gotten a lot of different recommendations  My personal choice for a Free  3rd Party Utility is    Agent Ransack Agent Ransack Download Despite its somewhat confusing name  it works well and can be used in a variety of ways to find files     Good Luck

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Yes there is only one program for Windows PC which have solid GUI and it is essential util for me  I work as a developer and on every computer I ve had  first thing install XFind program  It is created in 1997 and till now version is 1 0 and till now works and it is the best  Frequently I need to search some string in a   cs     aspx     sct   Visual FoxPro form code file  or just      and XFind scans all files and show me files and another great thing is that you can look where string is in the file  XFind has also some kind of editor  If it binary file it will show you string finded  Try it and use it forever if you are developer like me

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May be Everything  It supports regexps and has a console util too

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I also found one more way of utilizing GREP like functionality in Windows 7 and above without any extra application to install and on older systems you can use install Powershell   In Powershell  User can use Where-Object it has quite comprehensive set of feature that provides all the functionality of GREP plus more   Hope It helps

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Just try LikeGrep java utility  It may help you in very many cases   As you wish  it can also replace some text  found in files  It garantees its work on large files  up-to 8 Gb tested

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GnuWin32 is worth mentioning  it provides native Win32 version of all standard linux tools  including grep  file  sed  groff  indent  etc   And it s constantly updated when new versions of these tools are released

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as mentioned  findstr works fine  example     C  dir   findstr Windows  11 06 2013  09 55 PM              Windows

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Cygwin grep and more

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Use Cygwin     it has 32 and 64 bits versions and it works fine from Windows 2000      to Windows 10 or Server 2019  I use Cygwin for a long time      and recently tryed to substitute with Windows-Linux-Subsystems     not for long      I quickly went back to Cygwin again      much more flexible  controlable and rich    also less intrusive      just add  bin to the path     and you can use it anyware in Windows Batch Powershell    or in a DOS-Box    or in a Powershell-Box      Also you can install a ton of great packages that really work    like nginX or PHP    I even use the Cygwin PHP package in my IIS     As a bonus wou can also use it from a bash shell     I think this was the original intent  -

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We have recently used PowerGREP for some fairly advanced bulk operations on thousands of files  Including regex searching in content of PDF files  and altering PDF documents in largescale   Its worth the money if you want to save time from manuel labour  You can try it before you buy i think

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PowerShell  included as standard on Windows 7 2008R2  optional for XP 2003 Vista 2008  which includes the select-string cmdlet for this purpose

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Update  This wasn t true when the question was originally asked  but now Microsoft lets one Install the Windows Subsystem for Linux  and Windows will then run grep   In PowerShell  run   Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

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There is a command-line tool called FINDSTR that comes with all Windows NT-class operating systems  type FINDSTR    into a Command Prompt window for more information  It doesn t support everything grep does but it might be sufficient for your needs

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UnxUtils is a great set of Unix utilites that run on Windows   It has grep  sed  gawk  etc

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It has been a while since I ve used them  but Borland  Embarcadero now  included a command line grep with their C C   compiler   For some time  they have made available their 5 5 version as a free download after registering

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I m surprised no one has mentioned FINDSTR  I m no grep poweruser  but findstr does what I need it to  filter files and stdin  with some primitive regex support  Ships with Windows and all that   Edit  Well someone did mention findstr  It s late I guess

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I realize its an old question but I came across this post seeking an answer  And I have found one so adding it here for the collective internet memory  Powershell   Select-String Module  Microsoft PowerShell Utility  https   docs microsoft com en-us powershell module microsoft powershell utility select-string   and an informative blog post with advanced examnples   How to    grep    in PowerShell  https   antjanus com blog web-development-tutorials how-to-grep-in-powershell   A simple example from that blog post  cat package json   Select-String -Pattern webpack ls   src components    Select-String -Pattern View  C   cat post md   Select-String -Pattern    w

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TL DR  ripgrep  Since 2009  a lot happened  Rust delivered many CLI utilities  among them ripgrep  It is advertised as a recursively searches directories for a regex pattern  supports Windows  MacOSX and Linux    It is fast  Look at this performance comparison with similar tools  It also has many explanations on the design of the tool  Quite informative and geeky       Supports a wide range of features that the POSIX grep tools support  Look at the comparison by ack author here   If you have Scoop  you can install it with scoop install ripgrep  Else head over to the installation section of the doc

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An excellent and very fast file search utility  Agent Ransack  supports regular expression searching   It s primarily a GUI utility  but a command-line interface is also available

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There s a commercial grep utility available from Oak Road Systems

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the all-in-one busybox contains grep   egrep   sed   awk and MANY more get it from   http   frippery org busybox index html http   frippery org files busybox  C M O D  Update  no longer available - or some older  https   github com pclouds busybox-w32

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If you don t mind a paid-for product  PowerGREP is my personal favorite

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I ll add my  0 02 to this thread  dnGREP is a great open source grep tool for windows that supports undo  windows explorer integration  search inside PDFs  zips  DOCs and bunch of other stuff

User · Answer

Although not technically grep nor command line  both Microsoft Visual Studio and Notepad   have a very good Find in Files feature with full regular expression support  I find myself using them frequently even though I also have the CygWin version of grep available on the command line

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Bare Grep is nice if you want a GUI  Gnu grep is good for CLI

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On Windows I use Far Manager for file search  BSD licensed  works in console  saves time on typing cmdline parameters  Here is its search dialog invoked by Alt-F7

User · Answer

I recommend PowerGrep  I had to do an e-discovery project several years ago  I found that fisdstr had some limitations  most especially fisdstr would eventually fail   the script had to search across thousands of files using a couple of dozen search terms phrases    Cygwin s grep worked much better  it didn t choke often  but ultimately I went to PowerGrep because the graphical interface made it much easier to tell when and where it crashed  and also it was really easy to edit in all the conditionals and output that I wanted   Ultimately PowerGrep was the most reliable of the three

User · Answer

I know that it s a bit old topic but  here is another thing you can do  I work on a developer VM with no internet access and quite limited free disk space  so I made use of the java installed on it    Compile small java program that prints regex matches to the console  Put the jar somewhere on your system  create a batch to execute it and add the folder to your PATH variable   JGrep java   package com jgrep   import java io BufferedReader  import java io FileNotFoundException  import java io FileReader  import java io IOException  import java util regex Matcher  import java util regex Pattern   public class JGrep        public static void main String   args  throws FileNotFoundException  IOException           int printGroup   -1          if  args length  lt  2                System out println  Invalid arguments  Usage                 System out println  jgrep     -MODIFIERS   PATTERN   FILENAME                 System out println  Available modifiers                 System out println   -printGroup            - will print the given group only instead of the whole match  Eg  -printGroup 1                System out println  Current arguments                 for  int i   0  i  lt  args length  i                      System out println  args     i          args i                              return                    Pattern pattern   null          String filename   args args length - 1           String patternArg   args args length - 2                   pattern   Pattern compile patternArg            int argCount   2          while  args length - argCount - 1  gt   0                String arg   args args length - argCount - 1               argCount                if  arg startsWith  -printGroup                       printGroup   Integer parseInt arg substring  -printGroup   length                                      StringBuilder sb   new StringBuilder            try  BufferedReader br   new BufferedReader new FileReader filename                  sb   new StringBuilder                String line   br readLine                 while  line    null                    sb append line                   sb append System lineSeparator                     line   br readLine                                    Matcher matcher   pattern matcher sb toString             int matchesCount   0          while  matcher find                  if  printGroup  gt  0                    System out println matcher group printGroup                  else                   System out println matcher group                               matchesCount                      System out println  ----------------------------------------            System out println  File      filename           System out println  Pattern      pattern pattern             System out println  PrintGroup      printGroup           System out println  Matches      matchesCount             c  jgrep jgrep bat  together with jgrep jar     echo off java -cp c  jgrep jgrep jar com jgrep JGrep      and add c  jgrep in the end of the PATH environment variable   Now simply call jgrep  expression  file txt from anywhere    I needed to print some specific groups from my expression so I added a modifier and call it like jgrep -printGroup 1  expression  file txt

User · Answer

As mentioned above  the gnuwin32 project has a Windows CLI version of grep   If you want something with a graphical interface  I would recommend the  open-source  tool AstroGrep

[windows] Is there a Pattern Matching Utility like GREP in Windows?

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