Windows – Grep file in GVIM on Windows

grepvimwindows

On Linux, I sometimes see a list of all the lines which match a term with this handy command:

:! grep -n "term" %

However, I am now stuck on a Windows XP SP3 machine which lacks grep! Is there a way to get this list from within VIM itself, or using some other Windows tool via :!?

Thanks.

Best Answer

Use :g.

:g/term

:g/term/p

(Trivia: grep was named after the same g/re/p command in the ed editor, where re stands for "regular expression". The p suffix is optional, and is an abbrev for :print.)

To also display line numbers, either add :nu:

:g/term/nu

or just enable 'number' with :set number.

As an alternative to grep, Windows comes with tools find and findstr that have the same basic functions.

:! find "term" %

:! findstr term %

If your files contain no null bytes

In this case, you can use grep alone:

grep -Plz "termA.*termB|termB.*termA" *

How it works:

The Perl Compatible Regular Expressions termA.*termB and termB.*termA search for strings which have both terms in it.
The combined PCRE termA.*termB|termB.*termA matches all strings containing both terms.
Finally, the -z switch makes data lines end in null bytes instead of newlines.

By the way, there's no need to use -P. If you prefer to continue using POSIX Basic Regular Expressions, the syntax is similar:

grep -lz "termA.*termB\|termB.*termA" *

If your files contain null bytes

In this case, you'll need auxiliary tools:

(grep -l termA * ; grep -l termB *) | sort | uniq -d

How it works:

grep -l termA * ; grep -l termB * displays all files containing either of the terms. Files that contain both terms will be displayed twice.
sort sorts the output.
uniq -d only displays duplicate lines (required lines to be sorted).

Vim/gvim command line switches

See:

:help vim-arguments

Or more specifically:

:help startup-options

Or on the command line, if you want to see a summary:

vim --help

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – Search for files with more than one term (grep, awk?)

If your files contain no null bytes

If your files contain null bytes

Vim/gvim command line switches

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