Windows command line, I want to search a file for all rows starting with:
# NNN "<file>.inc"
where NNN is a number and <file> any string.
I want to use findstr, because I cannot require that the users of the script install ack.
Here is the expression I came up with:
>findstr /r /c:"^# [0-9][0-9]* \"[a-zA-Z0-9_]*.inc" all_pre.txt
The file to search is all_pre.txt.
So far so good. Now I want to pipe that to another command, say for example more.
>findstr /r /c:"^# [0-9][0-9]* \"[a-zA-Z0-9]*.inc" all_pre.txt | more
The result of this is the same output as the previous command, but with the file name as prefix for every row (all_pre.txt).
Then comes:
FINDSTR: cannot open |
FINDSTR: cannot open more
Why doesn't the pipe work?
snip of the content of all_pre.txt
# 1 "main.ss"
# 7 "main.ss"
# 11 "main.ss"
# 52 "main.ss"
# 1 "Build_flags.inc"
# 7 "Build_flags.inc"
# 11 "Build_flags.inc"
# 20 "Build_flags.inc"
# 45 "Build_flags.inc(function a called from b)"
EDIT: I need to escape the dot in the regex also. Not the issue, but worth to mention.
>findstr /r /c:"^# [0-9][0-9]* \"[a-zA-Z0-9_]*\.inc" all_pre.txt
EDIT after Frank Bollack:
>findstr /r /c:"^# [0-9][0-9]* \"[a-zA-Z0-9_]*\.inc.*" all_pre.txt | more
is not working, although (I think) it should look for the same string as before then any character any number of times. That must include the ", right?
You are missing a trailing \" in your search pattern.
findstr /r /c:"^# [0-9][0-9]* \"[a-zA-Z0-9]*.inc\"" all_pre.txt | more
The above works for me.
Edit:
findstr /r /c:"^# [0-9][0-9]* \"[a-zA-Z0-9]*\.inc.*\"" all_pre.txt | more
This updated search string will now match these lines from your example:
# 1 "Build_flags.inc"
# 7 "Build_flags.inc"
# 11 "Build_flags.inc"
# 20 "Build_flags.inc"
# 45 "Build_flags.inc(function a called from b)"
Edit:
To circumvent this "bug" in findstr, you can put your search into a batch file like this:
@findstr /r /c:"^# [0-9][0-9]* \"[a-zA-Z0-9_]*\.inc" %1
Name it something like myfindstr.bat and call it like that:
myfinsdtr all_pre.txt | more
You can now use the pipe and redirection operators as usual.
Hope that helps.
I can't really explain the why, but from my experience although findstr behaviour with fixed strings (e.g. /c:"some string") is exactly as desired, regular expressions are a different beast. I routinely use the fixed string search function like so to extract lines from CSV files:
C:\> findstr /C:"literal string" filename.csv > output.csv
No issue there.
But using regular expressions (e.g. /R "^\"some string\"" ) appears to force the findstr output to console and can't be redirected via any means. I tried >, >>, 1> , 2> and all fail when using regular expressions.
My workaround for this is to use findstr as the secondary command. In my case I did this:
C:\> type filename.csv | findstr /R "^\"some string\"" > output.csv
That worked for me without issue directly from a command line, with a very complex regular expression string. In my case I only had to escape the " for it to work. other characters such as , and . worked fine as literals in the expression without escaping.
I confirmed that the behaviour is the same on both windows 2008 and Windows 7.
EDIT: Another variant also apparently works:
C:\> findstr /R "^\"some string\"" < filename.csv > output.csv
it's the same principle as using type, but just using the command line itself to create the pipe.
If you use a regex with an even number of double quotes, it works perfectly. But your number of " characters is odd, redirection doesn't work. You can either complete your regex with the second quote (you can use range for this purpose: [\"\"]), or replace your quote character with the dot metacharacter.
It looks like a cmd.exe issue, findstr is not guilty.
