Question

I already know the obvious answer to this question: ‘just download <insert favorite windows grep or grep-like tool here>’. However, I work in an environment with strict controls by the local IT staff as to what we’re allowed to have on our computers. Suffice it to say: I have access to Perl on Windows XP. Here’s a quick Perl script I came up with that does what I want, but I haven’t figured up how to set up a batch file such that I can either pipe a command output into it, or pass a file (or list of files?) as an argument after the ‘expression to grep’:

 perl -n -e 'print $_ if (m![expression]!);' [filename] 

How do I write a batch script that I can do something like, for example:

 dir | grep.bat mypattern grep.bat mypattern myfile.txt 

EDIT: Even though I marked another ‘answer’, I wanted to give kudos to Ray Hayes answer, as it is really the ‘Windows Way’ to do it, even if another answer is technically closer to what I wanted.

Answer 1

I wrote this a while back:

@rem = '--*-Perl-*-- @echo off perl -x -S %0 %* goto endofperl   @rem -- BEGIN PERL -- '; #!d:/Perl/bin/perl.exe -w #line 10 use strict;  #use Test::Setup; use Getopt::Long;  Getopt::Long::Configure ('bundling');  my $ignore_case    = 0; my $number_line    = 0; my $invert_results = 0; my $verbose        = 0;  my $result = GetOptions(      'i|ignore_case' => \$ignore_case,      'n|number'      => \$number_line,     'v|invert'      => \$invert_results,     'verbose'       => \$verbose, ); my $regex = shift;  if ( $ignore_case ) {      $regex = '(?i:$regex)'; } $regex = qr/$regex/; print '\$regex=$regex\n'; if ( $verbose ) {      print 'Verbose: Ignoring case.\n'                      if $ignore_case;     print 'Verbose: Printing file name and line number.\n' if $number_line;     print 'Verbose: Inverting result set.\n'               if $invert_results;     print '\n'; }  @ARGV = map { glob '$_' } @ARGV;  while ( <> ) {      my $matches = m/$regex/;     next unless $matches ^ $invert_results;     print '$ARGV\:$.:' if $number_line;     print; }  __END__ :endofperl