What are good grep tool 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.

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

Findstr is fairly powerful, supports RegEx 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

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

Baregrep (Baretail is good too)

Answer 7

Cygwin includes grep. All the GNU tools amd Unix stuff works great on Windows if you install Cygwin.

http://www.cygwin.com/

Answer 8

PowerShell's Select-String cmdlet was fine in v1.0, but is significantly better for v2.0.

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

Answer 9

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).

Answer 10

UnxUtils is the one I use, works perfectly for me...

Answer 11

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.

Answer 12

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.

Answer 13

FindStr is on all Windows machines? Not the one I just tried it on...

Answer 14

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.