Is there a Pattern Matching Utility like GREP in Windows?

Question

Is there a similar utility to grep available from the Windows Command Prompt, or is there a third party tool for it?

Answer 1

We have recently used PowerGREP for some fairly advanced bulk operations on thousands of files. Including regex searching in content of PDF files, and altering PDF documents in largescale.

Its worth the money if you want to save time from manuel labour. You can try it before you buy i think.

Answer 2

As mentioned above, the gnuwin32 project has a Windows CLI version of grep.

If you want something with a graphical interface, I would recommend the (open-source) tool AstroGrep.

Answer 3

In the windows reskit there is a utility called "qgrep". You may have it on your box already. ;-) It also comes with the "tail" command, thank god!

Answer 4

the all-in-one busybox contains grep / egrep / sed / awk and MANY more

get it from:

• http://frippery.org/busybox/index.html
• http://frippery.org/files/busybox/?C=M;O=D

Update: no longer available - or some older

• https://github.com/pclouds/busybox-w32

Answer 5

I know that it's a bit old topic but, here is another thing you can do. I work on a developer VM with no internet access and quite limited free disk space, so I made use of the java installed on it.

Compile small java program that prints regex matches to the console. Put the jar somewhere on your system, create a batch to execute it and add the folder to your PATH variable:

JGrep.java:

package com.jgrep;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class JGrep {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws FileNotFoundException, IOException {
        int printGroup = -1;
        if (args.length < 2) {
            System.out.println("Invalid arguments. Usage:");
            System.out.println("jgrep [...-MODIFIERS] [PATTERN] [FILENAME]");
            System.out.println("Available modifiers:");
            System.out.println(" -printGroup            - will print the given group only instead of the whole match. Eg: -printGroup=1");
            System.out.println("Current arguments:");
            for (int i = 0; i < args.length; i++) {
                System.out.println("args[" + i + "]=" + args[i]);
            }
            return;
        }
        Pattern pattern = null;
        String filename = args[args.length - 1];
        String patternArg = args[args.length - 2];        
        pattern = Pattern.compile(patternArg);

        int argCount = 2;
        while (args.length - argCount - 1 >= 0) {
            String arg = args[args.length - argCount - 1];
            argCount++;
            if (arg.startsWith("-printGroup=")) {
                printGroup = Integer.parseInt(arg.substring("-printGroup=".length()));
            }
        }
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        try (BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(filename))) {
            sb = new StringBuilder();
            String line = br.readLine();

            while (line != null) {
                sb.append(line);
                sb.append(System.lineSeparator());
                line = br.readLine();
            }
        }
        Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(sb.toString());
        int matchesCount = 0;
        while (matcher.find()) {
            if (printGroup > 0) {
                System.out.println(matcher.group(printGroup));
            } else {
                System.out.println(matcher.group());
            }
            matchesCount++;
        }
        System.out.println("----------------------------------------");
        System.out.println("File: " + filename);
        System.out.println("Pattern: " + pattern.pattern());
        System.out.println("PrintGroup: " + printGroup);
        System.out.println("Matches: " + matchesCount);
    }
}

c:\jgrep\jgrep.bat (together with jgrep.jar):

@echo off
java -cp c:\jgrep\jgrep.jar com.jgrep.JGrep %*

and add c:\jgrep in the end of the PATH environment variable.

Now simply call jgrep "expression" file.txt from anywhere.

I needed to print some specific groups from my expression so I added a modifier and call it like jgrep -printGroup=1 "expression" file.txt.

Answer 6

PowerShell (included as standard on Windows 7/2008R2, optional for XP/2003/Vista/2008) which includes the select-string cmdlet for this purpose.