ugrep

Users of Unix operating systems are surely familiar with the grep command, a powerful tool that searches for regular expression matches. Built upon the skeleton of the grep command, the ugrep application offers enhanced command-line search functionality on Windows.

If you are familiar with the command line interface, it should be easy for you to work with ugrep. To get familiar with its options, you should first run the “--help” command, which opens up the manual, where you can see all the parameters that you can use, along with their description and usage examples.

But what can you search for with ugrep? The answer is: practically everything, everywhere and, moreover, notably fast, thanks to its revamped search engine. You can use ugrep to find text matches of regular expressions on file systems, inside text, source code and binary files, compressed files and archives, and the list does not end here.

ugrep supports all the known commands of grep while bringing to the table enhanced speed and new options to discover. A few are mentioned below.

One of the most notable features of ugrep is its integrated query UI that helps you search for files as you type using the “-Q” command. The query mode enables you to enter search patterns interactively. ugrep can carry out normal searches, but it can also look for fixed string or basic regex matches. It can perform Perl matching and it successfully handles fuzzy searches. Even in interactive mode, the query engine is configured to avoid system resource consumption and overload.

There are many more options to discover. ugrep can be used for performing recursive searches and display search statistics. It can look for files and regex matches, as well as non-Unicode files with a specific encoding mode. You can also use it to search for source code and filter files.

ugrep brings the power of the grep command to Windows, allowing users to take advantage of an impressive feature set and a reliable search utility. It is a good grep alternative with improved functionality, an interactive query UI and significantly faster search algorithms.