Find in files command line

Have a look here. It is important to understand the limitations of the batch file provided. For this reason I don't copy the source code in this answer. I'm prefer to use sed from GNU utilities for Win32 , the followings need to be noted. So the working code of sed to find and replace text in a file in windows is as below.

Because I'm not familiar with Powershell and want to save my searches for later use I need something more "user friendly" preferable if it has GUI. That little program has nice GUI and support regex for searching in filenames and within files. Only disadventage is that if you want to save your settings you have to run the program as an administrator at least on Win7. The script morechilli linked to will work for some files, but unfortunately it will choke on ones which contain characters such as pipes and ampersands.

VBScript is a better built-in tool for this task. You may then easily manipulate content multiple times before writing to a output file. Also see how multi-line values are given in a. For me, to be sure to not change the encoding from UTF-8 , keeping accents Download Cygwin free and use unix-like commands at the Windows command line.

The 2nd one is a filter. Getting content of the file and replacing it with some other text and then storing into another file. Command -1 Get-Content filename. If you have it, you can use Visual studio Find and Replace Utility. It allows you to select a folder and replace the contents of any file in that folder with any other text you want.

Hope this will be helpful. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. How can you find and replace text in a file using the Windows command-line environment? Ask Question. Asked 13 years, 4 months ago. Active 2 months ago. Viewed 1. Improve this question. Ray Ray k 96 96 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer.

Rachel Rachel k 60 60 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Beware, this command may also transcode the file to Unicode encoding. Also beware, if you target UTF8, it may introduce a Byte Order Mark at the beginning of the file that did not appear in the original. This works, but the performance is terrible on even a short list of files. Beware that the replace token 'foo' in this case is treated as a regular expression.

Show 11 more comments. Get-Content test. Michael Haren Mike Schall Mike Schall 5, 4 4 gold badges 35 35 silver badges 47 47 bronze badges. I can see PowerShell is capable of archieving this.

But how can I make this run from a batch file example: myProc. Pablo, use powershell. Sure the answer was accepted, but it's not answer to the specified question. This will fail with a file in use error if you save to the same file. You need to change the powershell command to: Get-Content test. See the answer from Rachel: powershell -Command " gc myFile. Show 16 more comments.

Usage example: fart. VonC VonC 1. The cool thing is it's one single exe. No dependencies. No small prints. Super easy to deploy. Very lightweight and easy to use, but I was hoping it would print out the exact places that replacements took place. Not being able to see that gave me a sense of insecurity. Thanks, it's perfect, should be part of the standard dos tools and worked a charm. The -p option however doesn't show you how many changes it 'would' make and always reports 0 which threw me for a few mins — sradforth.

I understand this is a very old question but I found more information and hope it will be helpful to Stack Overflow users. I have included your link in the answer for more visibility. Show 10 more comments. Bill Richardson Bill Richardson 1, 1 1 gold badge 9 9 silver badges 2 2 bronze badges. How is the sed suggestion better? This seems to be the most simple answer of them all and requires installing nothing.

Can any sort of pattern matching be done here? Wildcards, Regex etc? Asad, yes that's true, the OP was asking about files, but in fact it works with streams which don't have to be files.

Bill how to use variable as a replacing text? I have value in a variable and a string which has some delimter. Any workarounds? Show 5 more comments. Create file replace. ReadAll objFile. JamesQMurphy 3, 1 1 gold badge 34 34 silver badges 38 38 bronze badges. But i want to replace case-insensitive Can you provide the command for that?

Thank you, This script was great, I love your prefix str and obj word , I do the same, It's old but gold, It's make code more readable. Show 1 more comment. Community Bot 1 1 1 silver badge. I agree their terms are confusing, they also say "The information provided under the domain dostips.

I'm not sure I have ever read any terms and conditions and been happy This is great. I love answers that don't involve downloading something else to do it. Don't really have the time to debug it right now. Once removed, this worked fine. Here is the REPL. BAT script. Full documentation is embedded within the script. BAT version 6. Download Microsoft Edge More info. Contents Exit focus mode. Is this page helpful? Please rate your experience Yes No. Any additional feedback?

Submit and view feedback for This product This page. View all page feedback. In this article. Searches the specified list of directories. Each directory must be separated with a semicolon ; , for example dir1;dir2;dir3. If you're running Windows XP or later, consider using the improved findstr command. Find is an external command that is available for the following Microsoft operating systems as find.

If a pathname is not specified, FIND searches the text typed at the prompt or piped from another command. The next example searches for any text file. As seen in the output below, the only file containing "hope" is the CH.