I have just discovered findstr (I usually use egrep) and am having a
problem. It doesn't seem to recognize that * and . and presumably
others are special characters in regex. E.g., I cna succesfully search
for "company" but "company*' returns nothing. Similarly " company" is
OK, but " *company" returns nothing.
Suggestions?
C:\Documents and Settings\DS>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 occurances 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.
