How To Grep On Windows
Grep searches one or more input files for lines containing a match to a specified pattern. By default, grep prints the matching lines. You can use the 'type' and 'find' command in Dos/Windows to get the equivalent output of the UNIX 'cat' and 'grep' commands. The 'find' command can be very useful when you are trying to search for a specific text or phrase over multiple files. Windows Grep is a tool for searching files for text strings that you specify. Although Windows and many other programs have file searching capabilities built-in, none can match the power.
- Windows Grep is a free search tool for Windows that allows you search the text of multiple files at the same time. Its interface, although simple, is very practical and, thanks to its assistant, it is really easy to perform searches.
- Windows Grep Review. Sometimes you need to find a text file and you do not know the name of the file, but you know some of its contents. Before now, the only option you had was to open files one by one and manually search for what you wanted.
Apr 23, 2018 Findstr: Find Specific String In Files With Windows Command (Grep Alternative) And one of the basic requirement is to find specific strings within specific file or files or even from the output of a particular command. Grep is a command-line option used to find a specific string from inside a file or multiple files or from an output of a command but it can be used only in Linux. For Windows, the grep.
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?
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28 Answers
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 & exclude
- Search & 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.)
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Additional solutions
Existing Windows commands
- Select-String in PowerShell
Linux command implementations on Windows
Grep tools with a graphical interface
Additional Grep tools
FINDSTR is fairly powerful, supports regular expressions and has the advantages of being on all Windows machines already.
Example usage: findstr text_to_find * or to search recursively findstr /s text_to_find *
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..
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:
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
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.
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.
PowerShell has been mentioned a few times. Here is how you would actually use it in a grepish way:
It recursively searches all text files in the current directory tree for SomeString with case sensitivity.
Even better, run this:
Then do:
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.
How To Grep On Windows 1
Cygwin includes grep. All the GNU tools amd Unix stuff works great on Windows if you install Cygwin.
ack works well on Windows (if you've got Perl). I find it better than grep for many uses.
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!
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 :)
I always use WinGREP, but I've had issues with it not letting go of files.
Well, beside the Windows port of the GNU grep at:
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).
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.
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.
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:
Then browse to the SendTo folder. On Windows 7 browse to %APPDATA%MicrosoftWindowsSendTo 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'.
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UnxUtils is the one I use, works perfectly for me..
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..
windows findstr works..
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
PowerShell's select-string is similar, it's not the same options and semantics, but it's still powerful.
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.
Another good choice is MSYS. It gives you a bunch of other GNU utilities to allow you to be more productive.
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.
I've been using it forever and luckily it's still available. It's super fast and very small.
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!
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.