GREP — Find Regular Expressions in Files

What is GREP?

GREP searches for strings or regular expressions in files. Patterned after the UNIX utility fgrep, it’s also a vastly superior replacement for the DOS utility FIND. GREP runs on the command line in all versions of Windows.

You can find full details in the GREP Quick Start Guide and GREP Reference Manual, but here are highlights:

• GREP searches for strings, basic regular expressions, or (in 32-bit GREP) extended regular expressions involving |, {m,n}, ?, and more. For example, with FIND if you search for “the” you’ll also get matches for “these” and “mother”. Regular expressions let you screen out such false matches.
• GREP can search for multiple strings or regular expressions in one pass, from the keyboard or stored in a file. You can specify AND, OR, NOT ALL, or NONE logic.
• GREP searches text or binary files in DOS/Windows, UNIX, and Macintosh formats. GREP can even figure out whether each file is text or binary.
• GREP can search by line or paragraph, by binary record, or in free-form binary.
• GREP will search a whole subdirectory tree if you want.
• GREP honors DOS wildcards and UNIX globbing to specify which files to search and which to exclude from searching.
• Output is similar to DOS FIND or UNIX grep (your choice). Several options let you customize the output. For instance, instead of matching lines you can get counts of matches, or just the matches without the full lines, or just the names of files that contain matches. On the other hand, you can ask for context lines before and after each line that actually contains a match.
• GREP is useful in batch scripts and makefiles. You can tell it to return 0 for match and 1 for no match or the other way around; then your .bat or .cmd file or makefile can decide what to do next.

How do I get GREP?

Download the program, all docs, and an interactive tour as a 579 KB ZIP file. After downloading, unzip the file in any convenient directory and read the 0readme.1st file.

Need an unzip program? I use and recommend 7-Zip (freeware, open source) for Windows. It also includes a command-line version.

Installation instructions and system requirements are here.

How do I buy GREP?

There is no charge for the program. If you try it and find that it meets your needs, please make a donation, to thank the program author and to help with the cost of web hosting.

License and Warranty

GREP was formerly shareware, but is now distributed as freeware. All features of the former registered version are present in the freeware version.

If you find that GREP meets your needs, please make a donation to reward the program author and also support hosting fees on the Web.

Although I am not aware of any bugs in GREP, it is offered without warranty. Nevertheless, if you do find a bug, please report it.