Windows command line find file containing text

A literal character is a character that doesn't have a special meaning in the regular-expression syntax; instead, it matches an occurrence of that character. For example, letters and numbers are literal characters. A meta-character is a symbol with special meaning an operator or delimiter in the regular-expression syntax. The special characters in regular expression syntax have the most power when you use them together.

For example, use the combination of the wildcard character. Use the following expression as part of a larger expression to match any string beginning with b and ending with ing : b.

To search for multiple strings in a set of files, you must create a text file that contains each search criterion on a separate line.

To find all occurrences of the word Windows with an initial capital letter W in the file proposal. To search every file in the current directory and all subdirectories that contained the word Windows , regardless of the letter case, type:. To find all occurrences of lines that begin with FOR and are preceded by zero or more spaces as in a computer program loop , and to display the line number where each occurrence is found, type:.

Keep in mind that this is different than Windows find command which can be found following tutorial. The most basic usage of findstr searching a term in a file.

This search will use default options where we will look them next steps. In this example we will only provide the string and file name. In this example we will search ismail in file users. As we can see we provided the search term or string in double quotes to prevents errors and misuses. While searching terms the default behaviour is case sensitive. Case sensitive means all provided string upper and lower cases are searched according to their cases and no case change will be made. We can change this behaviour according to our needs and search terms in case sensitive so given search term will match all cases accordingly.

In previous example we have provided single term to search. In some situations we may need to search multiple terms. The second line does the search. You can find details about the parameters at this link. 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 to find if a file contains a given string using Windows command line Ask Question.

Asked 10 years, 9 months ago. Active 12 months ago. Viewed k times. I am trying to create a batch. For example, this doesn't work. Ross Ridge Jai Jai 3, 3 3 gold badges 21 21 silver badges 31 31 bronze badges.