Windows Grep Equivalent – findstr Examples for Grep Command

1. Overview

In this tutorial, We'll learn how to use the unix grep command in windows to search the files efficiently and what is the windows grep equivalent tool or command.

When you are using windows machine, many times you might have encountered the situations to search a piece of text in the windows machine.

After doing research, we found that there is a tool called findstr for windows operating system which matches to the grep command.

Let us explore the different type of search using findstr command.

2. By Filtering the Results

First, use the ls command and filter the results using grep command.

// example of unix grep command to filter
ls -l | grep javaprogramto

// windows equivalent command
dir | findstr javaprogramto

We can pass the multiple search patterns to the grep and findstr command.

unix grep: Use -E flag with grep command to pass multiple patterns and delimited by | pipe symbol. This pattern should be enclosed in double quotes.

windows findstr: Just need to pass the space separator to findstr command and keep the patterns in double quotes.

// example of unix grep command to filter
ls -l | grep -iE "javaprogramto|kotlin"

// windows equivalent command
dir | findstr "javaprogramto kotlin"

3. By Searching the Files

Let see now how to find the matches the in file for a specific pattern.

Below example is to find the match and second one is for get the matches count.

#Example 1
#Linux - find the matches
$ grep javaprogramto input.txt

#Windows - find the matches
c:\> findstr javaprogramto input.txt

#Example 2
#Linux - count the matches
$ grep -c javaprogramto input.txt

#Windows - count the matches
c:\> findstr -N javaprogramto input.txt

unix: -c flag works with grep command to get the count for the matched records

windows: -N flag for findstr

4. By Searching List Of Files

Next, search for a files names which has the given pattern in the given folder.

#Example 1
#Linux - search in folders
$ grep javaprogramto  -lr /path/folder

#Windows - search in folder files
c:\> findstr /M javaprogramto c:\folder\*

5. Help Command

We can get the help command for grep and findstr.

#Example to get help from provider
$ grep --help 
$ man grep 

#Windows
c:\> findstr -?

6. Conclusion

In this article, We've seen how to search files in windows just like unix grep command and shown the examples.

Reference

How to run unix commands from java code?