Basic Grep in Windows
When developing on Windows machines I often find myself needing to search through a group of files looking for a given string. The standard tool for the job is grep
, and while it can be installed on Windows it isn’t installed by default. Instead I’ve found that the findstr
command performs 90% of what I need.
For example the following will look through the current directory and all subdirectories for the string thetexttofind
findstr -s "thetexttofind" *.*
You can also search for regular expressions. The following example will search for all lines in a file that start with the string foo
findstr -s "^foo.*" *.*
If you prefer Powershell for Windows scripting, these commands work there as well.