Open source grep utility - winGrep

Last night's tip, discussed AstroGrep, an open source grep utility with some limitations. One of its drawbacks is its inability to export only the results for a search to a text file.

grepWin is another free grep utility, available for download here, from developer Stefan Küng. Like AstroGrep, grepWin is a grep utility with only basic features, which can be used to run regular expression searches in text files and some other types of files but not PDFs. While grepWin will not allow only the regex pattern matches to be exported to a file, it does allow the source files to be edited with find and replace searches. This makes it possible to add delimiters to the source files before and after the regex pattern, so the data can be parsed in Excel later.

Note that you'll need to click Search after having run the Replace operation, so the edited version of the text files will be displayed in the results list in grepWin. You will then be able to save the results by clicking on the small arrow at the bottom right of the screen.