Findstr

findstr is a shell command that searches for text in files¹ and prints matching lines to standard output.² The command provides similar functionality as find, but findstr supports some regular expression operators. However, findstr does not support UTF-16 whereas find does. findstr cannot search for null bytes commonly found in Unicode computer files.³

findstr was first released as part of the Windows 2000 Resource Kit under the name qgrep.⁴ The command is available in Windows⁵⁶ and ReactOS.⁷

The command syntax can be described as:

findstr FLAGS TEXT PATH...

TEXT

Text to search for.

PATH

Path to a file.

FLAGS:

/B

Match pattern if at the beginning of a line.

/E

Match pattern if at the end of a line.

/L

Use search strings literally.

/R

Use search strings as regular expressions.

/S

Search for matching files in the current directory and all subdirectories.

/I

Ignore case for matching.

/X

Print lines that match exactly.

/V

Print lines that do not match.

/N

Print the line number before each line that matches.

/M

Print only the file name if a file contains a match.

/O

Print 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 (/ for console).

/C:string

Use specified string as a literal search string.

/G:file

Get search strings from the specified file (/ for console).

/D:dir

Search a semicolon delimited list of directories

/?

Print help information about the command.

The following command searches the file named "services.txt" for lines containing "network" ignoring case.

findstr /i "network" services.txt