Question

I need to do a recursive grep in Windows, something like this in Unix/Linux:

grep -i 'string' `find . -print` 

or the more-preferred method:

find . -print | xargs grep -i 'string' 

I’m stuck with just cmd.exe, so I only have Windows built-in commands. I can’t install Cygwin, or any 3rd party tools like UnxUtils on this server unfortunately. I’m not even sure I can install PowerShell. Any suggestions using only cmd.exe built-ins (Windows 2003 Server)?

Answer 1

findstr can do recursive searches (/S) and supports some variant of regex syntax (/R).

C:\>findstr /? Searches for strings in files.  FINDSTR [/B] [/E] [/L] [/R] [/S] [/I] [/X] [/V] [/N] [/M] [/O] [/P] [/F:file]         [/C:string] [/G:file] [/D:dir list] [/A:color attributes] [/OFF[LINE]]         strings [[drive:][path]filename[ ...]]    /B         Matches pattern if at the beginning of a line.   /E         Matches pattern if at the end of a line.   /L         Uses search strings literally.   /R         Uses search strings as regular expressions.   /S         Searches for matching files in the current directory and all              subdirectories.   /I         Specifies that the search is not to be case-sensitive.   /X         Prints lines that match exactly.   /V         Prints only lines that do not contain a match.   /N         Prints the line number before each line that matches.   /M         Prints only the filename if a file contains a match.   /O         Prints 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(/ stands for console).   /C:string  Uses specified string as a literal search string.   /G:file    Gets search strings from the specified file(/ stands for console).   /D:dir     Search a semicolon delimited list of directories   strings    Text to be searched for.   [drive:][path]filename              Specifies a file or files to search.  Use spaces to separate multiple search strings unless the argument is prefixed with /C.  For example, 'FINDSTR 'hello there' x.y' searches for 'hello' or 'there' in file x.y.  'FINDSTR /C:'hello there' x.y' searches for 'hello there' in file x.y.  Regular expression quick reference:   .        Wildcard: any character   *        Repeat: zero or more occurrences of previous character or class   ^        Line position: beginning of line   $        Line position: end of line   [class]  Character class: any one character in set   [^class] Inverse class: any one character not in set   [x-y]    Range: any characters within the specified range   \x       Escape: literal use of metacharacter x   \<xyz    Word position: beginning of word   xyz\>    Word position: end of word  For full information on FINDSTR regular expressions refer to the online Command Reference.