What are good grep tools for Windows? [closed]

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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Based on recommendations in the comments, I've started using grepWin and it's fantastic and free.

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(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

• 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

Answer 3

FINDSTR is fairly powerful, supports regular expressions and has the advantages of being on all Windows machines already.

c:\> 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
  \<xyz    Word position: beginning of word
  xyz\>    Word position: end of word

Example usage: findstr text_to_find * or to search recursively findstr /s text_to_find *

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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 :)