Question

I have been using grepWin for general searching of files, and wingrep when I want to do replacements or what-have-you.

GrepWin has an extensive implementation of regular expressions, however doesn’t do replacements (as mentioned above).

Wingrep does replacements, however has a severely limited range of regular expression implementation.

Does anyone know of any (preferably free) grep tools for windows that does replacement AND has a reasonable implementation of regular expressions?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I use Cygwin quite a lot for this sort of task.

Unfortunately it has the world’s most unintuitive installer, but once it’s installed correctly it’s very usable… well apart from a few minor issues with copy and paste and the odd issue with line-endings.

The good thing is that all the tools work like on a real GNU system, so if you’re already familiar with Linux or similar, you don’t have to learn anything new (apart from how to use that crazy installer).

Overall I think the advantages make up for the few usability issues.