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.)

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..

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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:

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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.

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!

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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).

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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. Do i need a java command tool for my mac. 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

Grep Regex Tool For Mac Address

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.

Grep Regex Groups

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.

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I'm a newly minted CS major and I have been wondering what the benefits of using grep versus spotlight on mac. I ran a command to search for a specific file because I lost track of which directory it is in, which took a while, but when I did it in spotlight the result was instantaneous. I enjoy using the command line and it makes my life much simpler than the UI directory view on mac, so I would like to learn how to use it to its full potential.

2 Answers

Iterative

grep is usually to search file contents for matching patterns. Think searching file contents. grep will have to manually walk the file system from a given starting point.

I am curious how you were using grep.

find is the standard *nix command to search your file system for a file. Check out the man page, it has lots of ways to use it. But basically, it walks your file system from a given starting point and looks for matches.

Indexed

spotlight is an OSX utility that searches an indexed list of files. spotlight relies on an index and thus is capable of very fast lookups as it is not manually iterating over the file system. Usually a worker thread does that to build the index.

The tradeoff with spotlight is that if the file has not been indexed, then spotlight will not find it, even if it exists. However, if the directory has been indexed, then spotlight has good performance.

If you are needing to search for file contents and are using version control, say on a development project, agsilver_searcher is a much faster alternative to grep. It works within version control scenarios and respects your list of ignored file types to find files containing a pattern

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Grep Regex Match

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