What are good grep tools for Windows

Question

Any recommendations on grep tools for Windows  Ideally ones that could leverage 64-bit OS   I m aware of Cygwin  of course  and have also found PowerGREP  but I m wondering if there are any hidden gems out there

User · Answer

PowerShell has been mentioned a few times. Here is how you would actually use it in a grepish way:

Get-ChildItem -recurse -include *.txt | Select-String -CaseSensitive "SomeString"

It recursively searches all text files in the current directory tree for SomeString with case sensitivity.

Even better, run this:

function pgrep { param([string]$search, [string]$inc) Get-ChildItem -recurse -include $inc | Select-String -CaseSensitive $search }

Then do:

pgrep SomeStringToSearch *.txt

Then to really make it magical, add the function alias to your PowerShell Profile and you can almost dull the pain of not having proper command line tools.

User · Answer

I m the author of Aba Search and Replace  Just like PowerGREP  it supports regular expressions  saving patterns for further use  undo for replacements  preview with syntax highlight for HTML CSS JS PHP  different encodings  including UTF-8 and UTF-16   In comparison with PowerGREP  the GUI is less cluttered  Aba instantly starts searching as you are typing the pattern  incremental search   so you can experiment with regular expressions and immediately see the results   You are welcomed to try my tool  I will be happy to answer any questions

User · Answer

PowerShell s select-string is similar  it s not the same options and semantics  but it s still powerful

User · Answer

dnGREP is an open source grep tool for Windows  It supports a number of cool features including    Undo for replace Ability to search by right clicking on folder in explorer Advance search options such as phonetic search and xpath Search inside PDF files  archives  and Word documents   IMHO  it has a nice and clean interface too

User · Answer

UnxUtils is the one I use  works perfectly for me

User · Answer

I have Cygwin installed on my machine and put the Cygwin bin directory in my environmental path  so the Cygwin grep works like normal in a command line which solves all my scripting needs for grep at the moment

User · Answer

It may not exactly fall into the  grep  category  but I couldn t get by on Windows without a utility called AgentRansack   It s a gui-based  find in files  utility with regex support   It s dead simple to right-click on a folder  hit  ransack    and find files containing what you re looking for   Extremely fast too

User · Answer

PowerShell s Select-String cmdlet was fine in v1 0  but is significantly better for v2 0  Having PowerShell built in to recent versions of Windows means your skills here will always useful  without first installing something       New parameters added to Select-String  Select-String cmdlet now supports new parameters  such as          -Context  This allows you to see lines before and after the match line   -AllMatches  which allows you to see all matches in a line  Previously  you could see only the first match in a line     -NotMatch  Equivalent to grep -v o      -Encoding  to specify the character encoding      I find it expedient to create an function gcir for Get-ChildItem -Recurse    with smarts to pass parameters correctly  and an alias ss for Select-String  So you an write      gcir   txt   ss foo

User · Answer

dnGREP is an open source grep tool for Windows  It supports a number of cool features including    Undo for replace Ability to search by right clicking on folder in explorer Advance search options such as phonetic search and xpath Search inside PDF files  archives  and Word documents   IMHO  it has a nice and clean interface too

User · Answer

ack works well on Windows  if you ve got Perl   I find it better than grep for many uses

User · Answer

ack works well on Windows  if you ve got Perl   I find it better than grep for many uses

User · Answer

PowerShell s Select-String cmdlet was fine in v1 0  but is significantly better for v2 0  Having PowerShell built in to recent versions of Windows means your skills here will always useful  without first installing something       New parameters added to Select-String  Select-String cmdlet now supports new parameters  such as          -Context  This allows you to see lines before and after the match line   -AllMatches  which allows you to see all matches in a line  Previously  you could see only the first match in a line     -NotMatch  Equivalent to grep -v o      -Encoding  to specify the character encoding      I find it expedient to create an function gcir for Get-ChildItem -Recurse    with smarts to pass parameters correctly  and an alias ss for Select-String  So you an write      gcir   txt   ss foo

User · Answer

Another good choice is MSYS   It gives you a bunch of other GNU utilities to allow you to be more productive

User · Answer

PowerShell s Select-String cmdlet was fine in v1 0  but is significantly better for v2 0  Having PowerShell built in to recent versions of Windows means your skills here will always useful  without first installing something       New parameters added to Select-String  Select-String cmdlet now supports new parameters  such as          -Context  This allows you to see lines before and after the match line   -AllMatches  which allows you to see all matches in a line  Previously  you could see only the first match in a line     -NotMatch  Equivalent to grep -v o      -Encoding  to specify the character encoding      I find it expedient to create an function gcir for Get-ChildItem -Recurse    with smarts to pass parameters correctly  and an alias ss for Select-String  So you an write      gcir   txt   ss foo

User · Answer

PowerShell has been mentioned a few times. Here is how you would actually use it in a grepish way:

Get-ChildItem -recurse -include *.txt | Select-String -CaseSensitive "SomeString"

It recursively searches all text files in the current directory tree for SomeString with case sensitivity.

Even better, run this:

function pgrep { param([string]$search, [string]$inc) Get-ChildItem -recurse -include $inc | Select-String -CaseSensitive $search }

Then do:

pgrep SomeStringToSearch *.txt

Then to really make it magical, add the function alias to your PowerShell Profile and you can almost dull the pain of not having proper command line tools.

User · Answer

FINDSTR is fairly powerful  supports regular expressions and has the advantages of being on all Windows machines already   c   gt  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     lt xyz    Word position  beginning of word   xyz  gt     Word position  end of word   Example usage  findstr text to find   or to search recursively findstr  s text to find

User · Answer

If you want a simple to use Windows Grep tool  I created one called P-Grep that I have made available for free download from my website  www adjutantit com - home menu  downloads   Windows Grep seemed to have problems with a large number of files  so I wrote my own - which seems more reliable  You can select a folder  right click and send it to P-Grep  The sendto folder gets unpdated during installation

User · Answer

Based on recommendations in the comments  I ve started using grepWin and it s fantastic and free    I m still a fan of PowerGREP  but I don t use it anymore   I know you already mentioned it  but PowerGREP is awesome  Some of my favorite features are   Right-click on a folder to run PowerGREP on it Use regular expressions or literal text Specify wildcards for files to include  amp  exclude Search  amp  replace Preview mode is nice because you can make sure you re replacing what you intend to   Now I realize that the other grep tools can do all of the above  It s just that PowerGREP packages all of the functionality into a very easy-to-use GUI  From the same wonderful folks who brought you RegexBuddy and who I have no affiliation with beyond loving their stuff   It should be noted that RegexBuddy includes a basic version of grep  for Windows  itself and it costs a lot less than PowerGREP    Additional solutions Existing Windows commands  FINDSTR Select-String in PowerShell  Linux command implementations on Windows  Cygwin Cash  Grep tools with a graphical interface  AstroGrep BareGrep GrepWin  Additional Grep tools  dnGrep

User · Answer

I have successfully used GNU utilities for Win32 for quite some time and it has a good grep as well as tail and other handy gnu utils for win32  I avoid the packaged shell and simply use the executables right in win32 command prompt   The Tail that is packaged is quite a good little application as well

User · Answer

Update July 2013   Another grep tool I now use all the time on Windows is AstroGrep     Its ability to show me more than just the line search  i e  the --context NUM of a command-line grep  is invaluable  And it is fast  Very fast  even on an old computer with non-SSD drive  I know  they used to do this hard drive with spinning disks  called platters  crazy right    It is free  It is portable  simple zip archive to unzip      Original answer October 2008  Gnu Grep is alright  You can download it for example here   site ftp   All the usual options are here   That  combined with gawk and xargs  includes  find   from GnuWin32   and you can really script like you were on Unix   See also the options I am using to grep recursively     grep --include    xxx  -nRHI  my Text to grep

User · Answer

Baregrep  Baretail is good too

User · Answer

I always use WinGREP  but I ve had issues with it not letting go of files

User · Answer

I wanted a free grep tool for Windows that allowed you to right click on a folder and do a regex search of every file - without any nag screen    The following is a quick solution based on the findstr mentioned in a previous post   Create a text file somewhere on your hard drive where you keep long lived tools  Rename to  bat or  cmd and paste the following into it    echo off set  p term  Search term gt    del  temp  grepresult txt findstr  i  S  R  n  C   term      1       gt    temp  grepresult txt  start notepad   temp  grepresult txt    Then browse to the SendTo folder  On Windows 7 browse to  APPDATA  Microsoft Windows SendTo and drag a shortcut of the batch file to that SendTo folder   I renamed the shortcut to 1 GREP to keep it at the top of the SendTo list   Things that I d like to do next with this is pipe the output of findstr through something that would generate an html file so that you could click on each output line to open that file  Also  I don t think it works with shortcuts to folders  I d have to inspect the parameter and see if it contains   lnk

User · Answer

I ve been using AJC Grep daily for years   The only major limitation I ve found is that file paths are limited to 255 characters and it stops when it encounters one  rather than just issuing a warning  It s annoying but doesn t happen very often   I use it on 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate  so its 64-bit credentials are fine

User · Answer

Baregrep  Baretail is good too

User · Answer

I have successfully used GNU utilities for Win32 for quite some time and it has a good grep as well as tail and other handy gnu utils for win32  I avoid the packaged shell and simply use the executables right in win32 command prompt   The Tail that is packaged is quite a good little application as well

User · Answer

Based on recommendations in the comments  I ve started using grepWin and it s fantastic and free    I m still a fan of PowerGREP  but I don t use it anymore   I know you already mentioned it  but PowerGREP is awesome  Some of my favorite features are   Right-click on a folder to run PowerGREP on it Use regular expressions or literal text Specify wildcards for files to include  amp  exclude Search  amp  replace Preview mode is nice because you can make sure you re replacing what you intend to   Now I realize that the other grep tools can do all of the above  It s just that PowerGREP packages all of the functionality into a very easy-to-use GUI  From the same wonderful folks who brought you RegexBuddy and who I have no affiliation with beyond loving their stuff   It should be noted that RegexBuddy includes a basic version of grep  for Windows  itself and it costs a lot less than PowerGREP    Additional solutions Existing Windows commands  FINDSTR Select-String in PowerShell  Linux command implementations on Windows  Cygwin Cash  Grep tools with a graphical interface  AstroGrep BareGrep GrepWin  Additional Grep tools  dnGrep

User · Answer

PowerShell s Select-String cmdlet was fine in v1 0  but is significantly better for v2 0  Having PowerShell built in to recent versions of Windows means your skills here will always useful  without first installing something       New parameters added to Select-String  Select-String cmdlet now supports new parameters  such as          -Context  This allows you to see lines before and after the match line   -AllMatches  which allows you to see all matches in a line  Previously  you could see only the first match in a line     -NotMatch  Equivalent to grep -v o      -Encoding  to specify the character encoding      I find it expedient to create an function gcir for Get-ChildItem -Recurse    with smarts to pass parameters correctly  and an alias ss for Select-String  So you an write      gcir   txt   ss foo

User · Answer

GrepWin Free and open source  GPL   I ve been using grepWin which was written by one of the tortoisesvn guys   Does the job on Windows     http   stefanstools sourceforge net grepWin html

User · Answer

FINDSTR is fairly powerful  supports regular expressions and has the advantages of being on all Windows machines already   c   gt  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     lt xyz    Word position  beginning of word   xyz  gt     Word position  end of word   Example usage  findstr text to find   or to search recursively findstr  s text to find

User · Answer

FINDSTR is fairly powerful  supports regular expressions and has the advantages of being on all Windows machines already   c   gt  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     lt xyz    Word position  beginning of word   xyz  gt     Word position  end of word   Example usage  findstr text to find   or to search recursively findstr  s text to find

User · Answer

If you want a simple to use Windows Grep tool  I created one called P-Grep that I have made available for free download from my website  www adjutantit com - home menu  downloads   Windows Grep seemed to have problems with a large number of files  so I wrote my own - which seems more reliable  You can select a folder  right click and send it to P-Grep  The sendto folder gets unpdated during installation

User · Answer

I used Borland s grep for years but just found a pattern that it won t match  Eeeks  What else hasn t it found over the years  I wrote a simple text search replacement that does recursion like grep - it s FS EXE on source forge   grep fails     C  DEV gt GREP GAAPRNTR  SOURCE TPALIB   PRG  lt no results gt    windows findstr works     C  DEV gt FINDSTR GAAPRNTR  SOURCE TPALIB   PRG  SOURCE TPALIB TPGAAUPD PRG ffSPOOL cRPTFILE  MEM- gt GAAPRNTR  MEM- gt NETTYPE   SOURCE TPALIB TPPRINTR PRG     AADD mPRINTER    TPACONFG- gt GAAPRNTR   SOURCE TPALIB TPPRINTR PRG                IF TRIM TPACONFG- gt GAAPRNTR   lt  gt  TRIM mPRINTER 2    SOURCE TPALIB TPPRINTR PRG                    REPLACE TPACONFG- gt GAAPRNTR WITH mPRINTER 2

User · Answer

I have successfully used GNU utilities for Win32 for quite some time and it has a good grep as well as tail and other handy gnu utils for win32  I avoid the packaged shell and simply use the executables right in win32 command prompt   The Tail that is packaged is quite a good little application as well

User · Answer

Git on Windows   grep in cmd exe  I just found out installing Git will give you some basic Linux commands  cat  grep  scp and all other good ones   Install then add the Git bin folder to your PATH and then your cmd exe has basic Linux functionality   http   code google com p msysgit downloads list can 3

User · Answer

I used Borland s grep for years but just found a pattern that it won t match  Eeeks  What else hasn t it found over the years  I wrote a simple text search replacement that does recursion like grep - it s FS EXE on source forge   grep fails     C  DEV gt GREP GAAPRNTR  SOURCE TPALIB   PRG  lt no results gt    windows findstr works     C  DEV gt FINDSTR GAAPRNTR  SOURCE TPALIB   PRG  SOURCE TPALIB TPGAAUPD PRG ffSPOOL cRPTFILE  MEM- gt GAAPRNTR  MEM- gt NETTYPE   SOURCE TPALIB TPPRINTR PRG     AADD mPRINTER    TPACONFG- gt GAAPRNTR   SOURCE TPALIB TPPRINTR PRG                IF TRIM TPACONFG- gt GAAPRNTR   lt  gt  TRIM mPRINTER 2    SOURCE TPALIB TPPRINTR PRG                    REPLACE TPACONFG- gt GAAPRNTR WITH mPRINTER 2

User · Answer

It may not exactly fall into the  grep  category  but I couldn t get by on Windows without a utility called AgentRansack   It s a gui-based  find in files  utility with regex support   It s dead simple to right-click on a folder  hit  ransack    and find files containing what you re looking for   Extremely fast too

User · Answer

Well  beside the Windows port of the GNU grep at   http   gnuwin32 sourceforge net   there s also Borland s grep  very similar to GNU one  available in the freeware Borland s Free C   Compiler  it s a freeware with command line tools

User · Answer

If none of the solulutions is quite what you are looking for  perhaps you could write a wrapper to FindStr that does exactly what you require     FindStr is pretty good anyway so it should just be knocking a GUI up  if you want it  and providing a few extra features  like combining it with Find to find the count of files which contain a specified string  mentioned above     This  of course  assumes you have the requirement  time and inclination to do this

User · Answer

My tool of choice is the appropriately named Windows Grep    nice simple GUI supports search and replace can show the lines around the lines found can search within columns in CSVs and fixed-width files

User · Answer

Cygwin includes grep   All the GNU tools amd Unix stuff works great on Windows if you install Cygwin   http   www cygwin com

User · Answer

If none of the solulutions is quite what you are looking for  perhaps you could write a wrapper to FindStr that does exactly what you require     FindStr is pretty good anyway so it should just be knocking a GUI up  if you want it  and providing a few extra features  like combining it with Find to find the count of files which contain a specified string  mentioned above     This  of course  assumes you have the requirement  time and inclination to do this

User · Answer

GrepWin Free and open source  GPL   I ve been using grepWin which was written by one of the tortoisesvn guys   Does the job on Windows     http   stefanstools sourceforge net grepWin html

User · Answer

PowerShell s select-string is similar  it s not the same options and semantics  but it s still powerful

User · Answer

Cygwin includes grep   All the GNU tools amd Unix stuff works great on Windows if you install Cygwin   http   www cygwin com

User · Answer

I always use WinGREP  but I ve had issues with it not letting go of files

User · Answer

GREP for Windows  I ve been using it forever and luckily it s still available  It s super fast and very small

User · Answer

Cygwin includes grep   All the GNU tools amd Unix stuff works great on Windows if you install Cygwin   http   www cygwin com

User · Answer

It s been a couple of years since you asked the question  but I d recommend AstroGrep  http   astrogrep sourceforge net      It s free  open source  and has a simple interface   I use it to search code all the time

User · Answer

ack works well on Windows  if you ve got Perl   I find it better than grep for many uses

User · Answer

My tool of choice is the appropriately named Windows Grep    nice simple GUI supports search and replace can show the lines around the lines found can search within columns in CSVs and fixed-width files

User · Answer

Well  beside the Windows port of the GNU grep at   http   gnuwin32 sourceforge net   there s also Borland s grep  very similar to GNU one  available in the freeware Borland s Free C   Compiler  it s a freeware with command line tools

User · Answer

UnxUtils is the one I use  works perfectly for me

User · Answer

Baregrep  Baretail is good too

User · Answer

Baregrep  Baretail is good too

User · Answer

PowerShell s select-string is similar  it s not the same options and semantics  but it s still powerful

User · Answer

UnxUtils is the one I use  works perfectly for me

User · Answer

Git on Windows   grep in cmd exe  I just found out installing Git will give you some basic Linux commands  cat  grep  scp and all other good ones   Install then add the Git bin folder to your PATH and then your cmd exe has basic Linux functionality   http   code google com p msysgit downloads list can 3

User · Answer

ack works well on Windows  if you ve got Perl   I find it better than grep for many uses

User · Answer

Another good choice is MSYS   It gives you a bunch of other GNU utilities to allow you to be more productive

User · Answer

I always use WinGREP  but I ve had issues with it not letting go of files

User · Answer

UnxUtils is the one I use  works perfectly for me

User · Answer

Well  beside the Windows port of the GNU grep at   http   gnuwin32 sourceforge net   there s also Borland s grep  very similar to GNU one  available in the freeware Borland s Free C   Compiler  it s a freeware with command line tools

User · Answer

I have successfully used GNU utilities for Win32 for quite some time and it has a good grep as well as tail and other handy gnu utils for win32  I avoid the packaged shell and simply use the executables right in win32 command prompt   The Tail that is packaged is quite a good little application as well

User · Answer

I wanted a free grep tool for Windows that allowed you to right click on a folder and do a regex search of every file - without any nag screen    The following is a quick solution based on the findstr mentioned in a previous post   Create a text file somewhere on your hard drive where you keep long lived tools  Rename to  bat or  cmd and paste the following into it    echo off set  p term  Search term gt    del  temp  grepresult txt findstr  i  S  R  n  C   term      1       gt    temp  grepresult txt  start notepad   temp  grepresult txt    Then browse to the SendTo folder  On Windows 7 browse to  APPDATA  Microsoft Windows SendTo and drag a shortcut of the batch file to that SendTo folder   I renamed the shortcut to 1 GREP to keep it at the top of the SendTo list   Things that I d like to do next with this is pipe the output of findstr through something that would generate an html file so that you could click on each output line to open that file  Also  I don t think it works with shortcuts to folders  I d have to inspect the parameter and see if it contains   lnk

User · Answer

Based on recommendations in the comments  I ve started using grepWin and it s fantastic and free    I m still a fan of PowerGREP  but I don t use it anymore   I know you already mentioned it  but PowerGREP is awesome  Some of my favorite features are   Right-click on a folder to run PowerGREP on it Use regular expressions or literal text Specify wildcards for files to include  amp  exclude Search  amp  replace Preview mode is nice because you can make sure you re replacing what you intend to   Now I realize that the other grep tools can do all of the above  It s just that PowerGREP packages all of the functionality into a very easy-to-use GUI  From the same wonderful folks who brought you RegexBuddy and who I have no affiliation with beyond loving their stuff   It should be noted that RegexBuddy includes a basic version of grep  for Windows  itself and it costs a lot less than PowerGREP    Additional solutions Existing Windows commands  FINDSTR Select-String in PowerShell  Linux command implementations on Windows  Cygwin Cash  Grep tools with a graphical interface  AstroGrep BareGrep GrepWin  Additional Grep tools  dnGrep

User · Answer

I ve been using AJC Grep daily for years   The only major limitation I ve found is that file paths are limited to 255 characters and it stops when it encounters one  rather than just issuing a warning  It s annoying but doesn t happen very often   I use it on 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate  so its 64-bit credentials are fine

User · Answer

FINDSTR is fairly powerful  supports regular expressions and has the advantages of being on all Windows machines already   c   gt  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     lt xyz    Word position  beginning of word   xyz  gt     Word position  end of word   Example usage  findstr text to find   or to search recursively findstr  s text to find

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It may not exactly fall into the  grep  category  but I couldn t get by on Windows without a utility called AgentRansack   It s a gui-based  find in files  utility with regex support   It s dead simple to right-click on a folder  hit  ransack    and find files containing what you re looking for   Extremely fast too

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Based on recommendations in the comments  I ve started using grepWin and it s fantastic and free    I m still a fan of PowerGREP  but I don t use it anymore   I know you already mentioned it  but PowerGREP is awesome  Some of my favorite features are   Right-click on a folder to run PowerGREP on it Use regular expressions or literal text Specify wildcards for files to include  amp  exclude Search  amp  replace Preview mode is nice because you can make sure you re replacing what you intend to   Now I realize that the other grep tools can do all of the above  It s just that PowerGREP packages all of the functionality into a very easy-to-use GUI  From the same wonderful folks who brought you RegexBuddy and who I have no affiliation with beyond loving their stuff   It should be noted that RegexBuddy includes a basic version of grep  for Windows  itself and it costs a lot less than PowerGREP    Additional solutions Existing Windows commands  FINDSTR Select-String in PowerShell  Linux command implementations on Windows  Cygwin Cash  Grep tools with a graphical interface  AstroGrep BareGrep GrepWin  Additional Grep tools  dnGrep

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It s been a couple of years since you asked the question  but I d recommend AstroGrep  http   astrogrep sourceforge net      It s free  open source  and has a simple interface   I use it to search code all the time

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Cygwin includes grep   All the GNU tools amd Unix stuff works great on Windows if you install Cygwin   http   www cygwin com

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I have Cygwin installed on my machine and put the Cygwin bin directory in my environmental path  so the Cygwin grep works like normal in a command line which solves all my scripting needs for grep at the moment

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Well  beside the Windows port of the GNU grep at   http   gnuwin32 sourceforge net   there s also Borland s grep  very similar to GNU one  available in the freeware Borland s Free C   Compiler  it s a freeware with command line tools

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Update July 2013   Another grep tool I now use all the time on Windows is AstroGrep     Its ability to show me more than just the line search  i e  the --context NUM of a command-line grep  is invaluable  And it is fast  Very fast  even on an old computer with non-SSD drive  I know  they used to do this hard drive with spinning disks  called platters  crazy right    It is free  It is portable  simple zip archive to unzip      Original answer October 2008  Gnu Grep is alright  You can download it for example here   site ftp   All the usual options are here   That  combined with gawk and xargs  includes  find   from GnuWin32   and you can really script like you were on Unix   See also the options I am using to grep recursively     grep --include    xxx  -nRHI  my Text to grep

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I always use WinGREP  but I ve had issues with it not letting go of files

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It may not exactly fall into the  grep  category  but I couldn t get by on Windows without a utility called AgentRansack   It s a gui-based  find in files  utility with regex support   It s dead simple to right-click on a folder  hit  ransack    and find files containing what you re looking for   Extremely fast too

User · Answer

Update July 2013   Another grep tool I now use all the time on Windows is AstroGrep     Its ability to show me more than just the line search  i e  the --context NUM of a command-line grep  is invaluable  And it is fast  Very fast  even on an old computer with non-SSD drive  I know  they used to do this hard drive with spinning disks  called platters  crazy right    It is free  It is portable  simple zip archive to unzip      Original answer October 2008  Gnu Grep is alright  You can download it for example here   site ftp   All the usual options are here   That  combined with gawk and xargs  includes  find   from GnuWin32   and you can really script like you were on Unix   See also the options I am using to grep recursively     grep --include    xxx  -nRHI  my Text to grep

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PowerShell s select-string is similar  it s not the same options and semantics  but it s still powerful

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Update July 2013   Another grep tool I now use all the time on Windows is AstroGrep     Its ability to show me more than just the line search  i e  the --context NUM of a command-line grep  is invaluable  And it is fast  Very fast  even on an old computer with non-SSD drive  I know  they used to do this hard drive with spinning disks  called platters  crazy right    It is free  It is portable  simple zip archive to unzip      Original answer October 2008  Gnu Grep is alright  You can download it for example here   site ftp   All the usual options are here   That  combined with gawk and xargs  includes  find   from GnuWin32   and you can really script like you were on Unix   See also the options I am using to grep recursively     grep --include    xxx  -nRHI  my Text to grep

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GREP for Windows  I ve been using it forever and luckily it s still available  It s super fast and very small

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I m the author of Aba Search and Replace  Just like PowerGREP  it supports regular expressions  saving patterns for further use  undo for replacements  preview with syntax highlight for HTML CSS JS PHP  different encodings  including UTF-8 and UTF-16   In comparison with PowerGREP  the GUI is less cluttered  Aba instantly starts searching as you are typing the pattern  incremental search   so you can experiment with regular expressions and immediately see the results   You are welcomed to try my tool  I will be happy to answer any questions

[windows] What are good grep tools for Windows?

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