is a shell command that searches for text in filesMS-DOS and Windows command line findstr command and prints matching lines to standard output.Excellent documentation on usage of findstr 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.Findstr - Search for strings - Windows CMD - SS64.com

findstr was first released as part of the Windows 2000 Resource Kit under the name qgrep.History of Findstr from Raymond Chen The command is available in WindowsMicrosoft WinXP documentation for findstr Microsoft Server 2012/2016 documentation for findstr and ReactOS.

Use 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.

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

findstr /i "network" services.txt

See also

References

Further reading

External links findstr | Microsoft Docs