Findstr

findstr
Other namesqgrep
DevelopersMicrosoft, ReactOS Contributors
Operating systemWindows, ReactOS
PlatformCross-platform
TypeCommand
LicenseWindows: Proprietary commercial software
ReactOS: GNU General Public License
Websitedocs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/findstr

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

findstr was first released as part of the Windows 2000 Resource Kit under the name qgrep. The command is available in Windows and ReactOS.

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