GREP Gen - Regex Tester/Debugger
Grepwin Download | SourceForge.net

A fast and powerful alternative to grep.

Windows Grep is a tool for searching files for text strings that you specify. Although Windows and many other programs have file searching capabilities built-in, none can match the power.

As every Linux user surely knows, grep is a reliable command-line tool for in-depth file searching. Still, many beginners avoid it because they dislike the terminal. The apps presented in this article aren’t exactly alternatives to grep because in some usage scenarios grep is truly irreplaceable.
Grep is a UNIX command-line program which searches within files for keywords. AstroGrep supports regular expressions, versatile printing options, stores most recently used paths and has a 'context' feature which is very nice for looking at source code. AstroGrep v4.4.7 Released Posted on April 5, 2019.
18 How to make grep terminate file names with NULL character. As we have already discussed, the -l command-line option of grep is used when you only want the tool to display filenames in the output. For example: Now, what you should know here is that each name in the above output is separated/terminated by a newline character.
The grep utility is a powerful tool and can use regular expressions. Regular expressions can be considered ‘logic rules’ for matching text strings. Think of something like “I know the word should be starting with the letter ‘a’, but after that everything is fine”.

Most of the existing tools for searching through large amounts of text are either fast but inflexible (the original grep) or slightly more flexible but slow or complicated to install.

sift is an alternative that aims for both speed and flexibility - i.e. adding features while trying to reach (or even surpass) the performance of the original grep.
The additional features include gitignore support, conditions (e.g. match A only when preceded by B within X lines) , full multi-core support and multiline matching.

Customization

sift is not tailored towards a specific use case, but you can customize it to your needs through a global or local configuration file.

If you want sift to ignore case, show line numbers, skip binary files and understand .gitignore files by default, just execute
sift -i -n --binary-skip --git --write-config
and you are done.

Please see the features and samples to get a better impression of what you can do with sift.

The goals and design principles of sift are documented here to give a better idea of what to expect from sift.

Search everywhere, unless specified otherwise: let the user decide what should not be searched.

Do not favor a use case (code search/auditing, system administration, DFIR log search), but ensure sift can be configured to best match the requirements.

Make it easy to customize sift through config files to change the default behavior system-wide or for a specific project path.

Select performance-oriented alternatives by default.

Strive for stability and correctness, especially when used as grep replacement. Do not hesitate to show errors/warnings.

Optimize for future performance requirements, i.e. support and make use of multi-core systems.

Be unobtrusive: only write to files if requested by the user, never execute other programs on the system.

Product Overview

A free file finding and text searching tool

GREP Gen - Regex Tester/Debugger

Regular expression text search
- High-performance search algorithm
- Regex syntax is a common subset of Perl, PHP and Java (see the Regex Reference).
- Simple search mode for literal strings, when not using regexes

Wildcard and regular expression file search
- Files to find or search can be specified as a list including wildcards
- Files to find or search can be specified with a regular expression
- Multiple files can also be specified with the mouse

Recursive directory search
- Find and search matching files anywhere on the file-system

Save, name and manage text search patterns
- Frequently used text search patterns may be saved, named and edited
  Proshow producer.

Interactive, incremental search
- Searching while you type, to find results quicker
- Feedback on regex syntax errors while you type, to build regexes quicker

Extract data with capturing groups
- Capturing groups (using bracket characters '(' and ')' in a regex) extract strings from files (see the Regex Reference).

Tabular presentation of search results
- Columns include the filename, line number, text of the line, and results of capturing groups
- Columns can be sorted

Export/copy of search results in many formats
- Export search results to a file or the clipboard
- Configurable selection of search result columns
- Configurable prefix, suffix, alignment and truncation

Search files of any size (> 2GB)

Many file formats
- Windows / DOS text files (lines end in CR/LF pairs)
- Unix text files (lines end in LF)
- Microsoft IIS logfiles (and other files terminated with a string of nulls)

Grepwin Download | SourceForge.net

Flexible configuration options and storage
- Many configurable user preferences
- Preferences can be saved to a file, the registry or not at all on exit
- Preferences are loaded from a file in the local directory, a file in the application directory or the registry (in that order)
- Preferences can be loaded and saved at any time by the user, and shared with other users

Single small executable, no installer
- No installation needed, start using the tool immediately
- Small executable can be run from the network
- Easy to temporarily install and then completely remove

Grep Tool