Search and find text in windows command line

Last updated on 2018-12-15 1 min read productivity, batch

Background

When one has a large text file to sift through, windows command line executables might come to rescue. To illustrate usefulness of some of these tools. I have build herein an example case where you require finding a line with search certain search pattern.

Case

Let us use output of another command and redirect the stdout to a file. Firstly, it is a good idea to cd /d into the path of interest. Here the output contains listing of all python packages installed the specified environment. With > pipe, we redirect the text output to a file.

conda list -n environment_name > path\to\directory\text_file.txt

Then using findstr command search for required pattern. It supports wide variety of search types. First one uses regex pattern search. Now one can check if specific package is installed or not using the this command with the output file above.

findstr /R  "regex_pattern" path\to\directory\text_file.txt

Search types available in findstr can be glanced at using help findstr. For sake of simplicity, some of these are:

/B : Matches pattern if at beginning of line
/E : Matches pattern if at end of line
/L : Uses search string literally
/S : Searches for matching files in current directory and all subdirectories
/I : Search is not case-sensitive