Command Line Version of Grep for Windows

This grep for windows is a commercially supported windows build of the grep tool for win32 and win64 platforms. It is an alternative to the free win32 builds of GNU grep when using open source or unsupported tools is not an option in your environment.

What is Grep for Windows?

grep is a combination of fgrep and egrep. If you do not specify either -E or -F, (or their long form equivalents, --extended-regexp or --fixed-strings), grep behaves like egrep, but matches basic or regular expressions instead of extended ones. You can specify a pattern to search for with either the -e-f option. If you specify neither option, grep (or egrep or fgrep) takes the first non-option argument as the pattern for which to search. If grep finds a line that matches a pattern, it displays the entire line. If you specify multiple input files, the name of the current file precedes each output line.

Besides normal ASCII text files, these utilities also work on UTF-8 files and 16-bit wide Unicode files. Such files normally begin with a multiple-byte marker indicating whether the file's contents are Unicode big-endian, Unicode little-endian, or UTF-8. Such files are detected automatically by these utilities; however, when the multiple-byte marker is missing you can use the -U option.

Normally, the output format of these utilities defaults to the format of the first file it displays.