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 regular expressions. 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: 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.
; /C:string: Use specified string as a literal search string.
; /G:file: Get search strings from the specified file.
; /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