Findstr

Last updated
findstr
Other namesqgrep
Developers Microsoft, ReactOS Contributors
Operating system Windows, ReactOS
Platform Cross-platform
Type Command
License Windows: Proprietary commercial software
ReactOS: GNU General Public License
Website docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/findstr

findstr is a shell command that searches for text in files [1] and prints matching lines to standard output. [2] The command provides similar functionality as find , but findstr supports regular expressions. However, findstr does not support UTF-16 whereas find does. findstr cannot search for null bytes commonly found in Unicode computer files. [3]

Contents

findstr was first released as part of the Windows 2000 Resource Kit under the name qgrep. [4] The command is available in Windows [5] [6] and ReactOS. [7]

Use

The command syntax can be described as:

findstr FLAGS TEXT PATH...
TEXT
Text to search for.
PATH
Path to a file.

FLAGS:

/B
Match pattern if at the beginning of a line.
/E
Match pattern if at the end of a line.
/L
Use search strings literally.
/R
Use search strings as regular expressions.
/S
Search for matching files in the current directory and all subdirectories.
/I
Ignore case for matching.
/X
Print lines that match exactly.
/V
Print lines that do not match.
/N
Print the line number before each line that matches.
/M
Print only the file name if a file contains a match.
/O
Print 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 (/ for console).
/C:string
Use specified string as a literal search string.
/G:file
Get search strings from the specified file (/ for console).
/D:dir
Search a semicolon delimited list of directories
/?
Print help information about the command.

Example

The following command searches the file named "services.txt" for lines containing "network" ignoring case.

findstr /i "network" services.txt

See also

References

  1. ↑ MS-DOS and Windows command line findstr command
  2. ↑ Excellent documentation on usage of findstr
  3. ↑ Findstr - Search for strings - Windows CMD - SS64.com
  4. ↑ History of Findstr from Raymond Chen
  5. ↑ Microsoft WinXP documentation for findstr
  6. ↑ Microsoft Server 2012/2016 documentation for findstr
  7. ↑ "Reactos/Reactos". GitHub . 16 October 2021.

Further reading

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