Windows findstr and Regular Expressions

The Windows findstr command accepts regular expressions or literal expressions. It will guess what you're using, and may guess incorrectly, so it's best to use the /R and /L options to directly specify if your search pattern is a regexp or literal.

Findstr permits multiple search patterns in a quoted string, separated by a space; this acts like a type of alternation. However, this makes it impossible to use a literal space in a search pattern. If you wish to include a space in your search pattern, prepend /C: to your search string. You can use multiple /C: search strings.

For example, FINDSTR /R /C:"red" /C:"blue" INPUTFILE is roughly equivalent to grep -E "red|blue" INPUTFILE

Findstr is also limited to (approximately) 127 characters in the regular expression.

For information on findstr's regular expression dialect, see help findstr. In particular, the findstr command does not support:

• alternation with the | symbol
• repetition other than with the * symbol
• named character classes [[:*name*:]]
• grouping ( )