Using findstr in batch files

Windows provides findstr tool to search file contents. These file contents expected to be text and string but binary binary files are accepted too. But searching binary files and content will not give good results. In this tutorial we will look different usage types of the findstr command. Keep in mind that this is different than Windows find command which can be found following tutorial. The most basic usage of findstr searching a term in a file.

This search will use default options where we will look them next steps. In this example we will only provide the string and file name. In this example we will search ismail in file users. As we can see we provided the search term or string in double quotes to prevents errors and misuses. While searching terms the default behaviour is case sensitive.

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John Fenderson said on May 5, at am. I can never get Windows 10 search to find anything. Mark Hazard said on May 4, at pm. Thanks for the article, Martin.

Anonymous said on May 4, at pm. BM said on May 5, at am. You mean FileLocator Lite? Been using that for years.

Still findstr might have its uses. Jessica said on May 4, at pm. PowerShell equivalent is Select-String. Martin Brinkmann said on May 5, at am. Maarten said on May 5, at am. Robert G. I use grepWin 1.

STech said on May 7, at pm. TelV said on May 8, at am. TelV said on May 8, at pm. Actually, come to think of it, the remove command should be: DISM. Anonymous said on May 8, at pm. If the first search string is a valid regular expression that contains at least one un-escaped meta-character, then all search strings are treated as regular expressions.

Otherwise all search strings are treated as literals. For example, " A literal search also allow searching for punctuation characters. The file name is not printed if the request was explicitly for a single file, or if searching piped input or redirected input.

When printed, the fileName will always include any path information provided. The printed path is always relative to the provided path, or relative to the current directory if none provided. Nothing is left out of the binary output, such that this example that matches all lines will produce an exact binary copy of the original file:.

For example: to use the search criteria in Criteria.