findstr

Searches for patterns of text in files.

Syntax

Parameters

Parameter	Description
/b	Matches the text pattern if it is at the beginning of a line.
/e	Matches the text pattern if it is at the end of a line.
/l	Processes search strings literally.
/r	Processes search strings as regular expressions. This is the default setting.
/s	Searches the current directory and all subdirectories.
/i	Ignores the case of the characters when searching for the string.
/x	Prints lines that match exactly.
/v	Prints only lines that don’t contain a match.
/n	Prints the line number of each line that matches.
/m	Prints only the file name if a file contains a match.
/o	Prints character offset before each matching line.
/p	Skips files with non-printable characters.
/off[line]	Does not skip files that have the offline attribute set.
/f:	Gets a file list from the specified file.
/c:	Uses the specified text as a literal search string.
/g:	Gets search strings from the specified file.
/d:	Searches the specified list of directories. Each directory must be separated with a semicolon (;), for example dir1;dir2;dir3 .
/a:	Specifies color attributes with two hexadecimal digits. Type color /? for additional information.
Specifies the text to search for in filename. Required.
[\ :][

] [. ] Specifies the location and file or files to search. At least one file name is required. /? Displays Help at the command prompt.

Remarks

All findstr command-line options must precede strings and filename in the command string.

Regular expressions use both literal characters and meta-characters to find patterns of text, rather than exact strings of characters.

A literal character is a character that doesn’t have a special meaning in the regular-expression syntax; instead, it matches an occurrence of that character. For example, letters and numbers are literal characters.

A meta-character is a symbol with special meaning (an operator or delimiter) in the regular-expression syntax.

The accepted meta-characters are:

Meta-character	Value
.	Wildcard — Any character
*	Repeat — Zero or more occurrences of the previous character or class.
^	Beginning line position — Beginning of the line.
$	Ending line position — End of the line.
[class]	Character class — Any one character in a set.
[^class]	Inverse class — Any one character not in a set.
[x-y]	Range — Any characters within the specified range.
\x	Escape — Literal use of a meta-character.
\	Beginning word position — Beginning of the word.
string\>	Ending word position — End of the word.

The special characters in regular expression syntax have the most power when you use them together. For example, use the combination of the wildcard character ( . ) and repeat ( * ) character to match any string of characters: .*

Use the following expression as part of a larger expression to match any string beginning with b and ending with ing: b.*ing

To search for multiple strings in a set of files, you must create a text file that contains each search criterion on a separate line.

Use spaces to separate multiple search strings unless the argument is prefixed with /c.

Examples

To search for hello or there in file x.y, type:

To search for hello there in file x.y, type:

To find all occurrences of the word Windows (with an initial capital letter W) in the file proposal.txt, type:

To search every file in the current directory and all subdirectories that contained the word Windows, regardless of the letter case, type:

To find all occurrences of lines that begin with FOR and are preceded by zero or more spaces (as in a computer program loop), and to display the line number where each occurrence is found, type:

To list the exact files that you want to search in a text file, use the search criteria in the file stringlist.txt, to search the files listed in filelist.txt, and then to store the results in the file results.out, type:

To list every file containing the word computer within the current directory and all subdirectories, regardless of case, type:

To list every file containing the word computer and any other words that begin with comp, (such as compliment and compete), type:

How to do a simple file search in cmd

I want to quickly search for a file given its name or part of its name, from the windows command line (not power shell). This is similar to opening explorer and using the search box at the top.

Note: dir can search based on a string template but it will not search in the subdirectories.

Note2: findstr can be used to search for a token inside files and has a recursivity flag; it’s funny that a more complex find can be easily discovered .

5 Answers 5

dir /s *foo* searches in current folder and sub folders.

It finds directories as well as files.

/s Lists every occurrence of the specified file name within the specified directory and all subdirectories.

searches for all txt file in the directory tree. Before using it just change the directory to root using

you can also export the list to a text file using

and search within using

EDIT 1: Although this dir command works since the old dos days but Win7 added something new called Where

will search for exe & dll in the drive c:\Windows as suggested by @SPottuit you can also copy the output to the clipboard with

just wait for the prompt to return and don’t copy anything until then.

EDIT 2: If you are searching recursively and the output is big you can always use more to enable paging, it will show — More — at the bottom and will scroll to the next page once you press SPACE or moves line by line on pressing ENTER

Findstr: Find Specific String In Files With Windows Command (Grep Alternative)

Most of the users who use Linux are very comfortable with using command-line. And one of the basic requirement is to find specific strings within specific file or files or even from the output of a particular command. Grep is a command-line option used to find a specific string from inside a file or multiple files or from an output of a command but it can be used only in Linux. For Windows, the grep alternative is findstr.

Since Windows users are not used to use command-line for smaller things, most of the users don’t know how to find a specific string in files using Windows command-line or even PowerShell. In this article, we will discuss about how to use findstr (equivalent of Grep in Windows) in command prompt and also how to use the find function using PowerShell. Let’s discuss about different scenarios which can be used in real-world situations.

Filter an output of a command Using Command Prompt

If you want to filter the results of a command, you can use | findstr “string_to_find”

For example, I mostly use netstat for checking the connections being made on my computer. If I want to check which app or IP address is connected to a specific port, I’ll use the following command:

netstat | findstr “imaps”

This will show me only secure imap ports opened on my computer.

Search for a specific string inside a single file Using Command Prompt

The command for this purpose is:

findstr “string_to_find” “file_name”

findstr “reader” “new 1.txt”

You can also give full path of the file if it’s not in the same directory as opened in command prompt. find text string in a file

Search for a specific string in a folder using Findstr

You can also specify a folder for finding a specific text string in multiple files.

findstr /M “reader” “C:\Users\Usman\Desktop\*”

This will give a list of all files with full path containing the text string “reader”. If you don’t specify /M, the output will show the exact text string along with the file name where it found the string. Finding a string from folder

You can go through all the switches you can use with the command here.

This command can be useful in many cases especially when I am creating a log of network activities and have to find a specific thing from the log. What do you do with this filter command “findstr”?

Continue Reading:

Usman Khurshid is a seasoned IT Pro with over 15 years of experience in the IT industry. He has experience in everything from IT support, helpdesk, sysadmin, network admin, and cloud computing. He is also certified in Microsoft Technologies (MCTS and MCSA) and also Cisco Certified Professional in Routing and Switching. Reach him at Twitter @usmank11

7 thoughts on “ Findstr: Find Specific String In Files With Windows Command (Grep Alternative) ”

The author seems to have forgotten the article was also to discuss “how to use the find function using PowerShell”.

Thanks for giving the grep equivalent in windows. I wish you come up with equivalents of all commonly used unix commands and compile in a file so that users like me can use it as a reference book. Thanks once again.

What other commands do you normally use in Linux and Unix that are not available in Windows?

I’ve been trying to find filenames that start with a certain string.
I started by finding all files within a certain directory which contains a bunch of sub directories and such by ‘dir * /s/b | findstr “.*\..*”‘ I pipped the results to a DirectoryListing.txt file to store all the paths.
I also have a List.txt file which contains strings of filenames, ie: ‘12345’. Each filename is on its own line.
I then tried to find all filenames that start with strings contained within the List.txt from my DirectoryListing.txt file. In doing so I got filenames that didn’t start with my searched string. If I took my string ‘12345’, I would expect to get back filenames that start with ‘12345’, but I also received filenames that included a hyphen ’11-12345′. Like in your example where you FINDSTR ‘reader’ it returned “adobe-reader-…”.
This is how I am trying to parse the file: For /F “Delims=|” %%X In (‘FINDSTR /IRC:”\” “%destination%\%DirList%”‘)
%%A is the string to find, ie: ‘12345’
%DirList% is my DirectoryListing.txt

My question is how would I be able to use FINDSTR to find filenames that start with a certain string and not have a ‘-‘ hyphen before the string?

Do I understand correctly: findstr matches a STRING, not a regular expression pattern, right?

And you call that an “equivalent to grep”??

The closest alternative of grep in Windows is findstr. We can’t compare all the features of each command but the basic function of the commands is the same.

I am trying to filter a gitbranch name so I used git branch | findstr “*” it is outputting a branch name but including the * sign. I was wondering if there is any way to select the exact name of the branch and save it to the string.
SPecially for branches lik rel-0.1 it is not working.

I am trying to convert git branch | grep \* | cut -d ‘ ‘ -f2 | git pull origin from bash script to
>git branch | findstr “*” | git pull origin but anytime the branch name is like rel-0.1 it does not work but for others it is working.
The goal is to pull origin from the current selected branch.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Recent Posts

Microsoft has released Windows PowerShell 7.2 Preview 5, bringing in a few changes and fixes to the command line. You can download and install this release on your device using the given guide down.

Google has released Chrome version 90 for everyone to download and use. You can update your existing Chrome version using the guide given in the article, or download Google Chrome 90 from the given.

About Itechtics

iTechtics is a technology blog focusing on Windows news, software and downloads, software tips and tricks, Web services, Security and Office productivity.

Find all files in a folder

I am looking to create a program that finds all files of a certain type on my desktop and places them into specific folders, for example, I would have all files with .txt into the Text folder.

Any ideas what the best way would be to accomplish this? Thanks.

I have tried this:

It was not successful in finding all of the files.

3 Answers 3

A lot of these answers won’t actually work, having tried them myself. Give this a go:

It will move all .txt files on the desktop to the folder TextFiles .

First off; best practice would be to get the users Desktop folder with

Then you can find all the files with something like

Note that with the above line you will find all files with a .txt extension in the Desktop folder of the logged in user AND all subfolders.

Then you could copy or move the files by enumerating the above collection like

Please note that you will have to include the filename in your Copy() (or Move() ) operation. So you would have to find a way to determine the filename of at least the extension you are dealing with and not name all the files the same like what would happen in the above example.

With that in mind you could also check out the DirectoryInfo and FileInfo classes. These work in similair ways, but you can get information about your path-/filenames, extensions, etc. more easily