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do you want to searc for a particular word in a file in your windows folders, this page will help you find specific text within some files in a folder and subfolders in your windows computer [648], Last Updated: Sat May 18, 2024
mel
Sun Jun 26, 2011
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are you familiar with linux.. in linux there is a utility called grep. grep is a very useful tool for searching text within files. did you know that you can have grep in windows.. yes.. windows. you can download at
http://www.wingrep.com/download.htmalternatively you can use the findstr (find string) utility in windows, its a big more complicated then the grep GUI utility from the download above, but if you dont want to install the app in your computer, windows 7 comes already with the findstr utility
i learned about windows grep because i wanted to search for a certain text in a directory to edit. so after searching, i found that grep for windows does all kinds of searches in your files, it works on all the ascii text like notepad word docs and even like php files which is where i wanted for searching my text.
if you want to know more about findstr command just send this command on the DOS command promt: findstr /?
you will get something like this:
D:\>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 occurrences 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
For full information on FINDSTR regular expressions refer to the online Command
Reference.