PowerGREP Changelog

What's new in PowerGREP 5.3.5

Jan 18, 2024

Bug fixes:
Sequences failed with an access violation during or after the first step (5.3.4 only).

New in PowerGREP 5.3.4 (Jan 9, 2024)

New in PowerGREP 5.3.3 (May 18, 2023)

Improvements:
Action: Convert matched files to text no longer rewrites files that already use the desired encoding and do not need to have any line breaks changed or a BOM added or removed.
Editor|New now toggles the editor to hexadecimal mode if the default encoding specified in the text encoding configuration selected on the File Selector panel is “binary file”; it toggles the editor to text mode if the default encoding is anything else.
File Formats: PDF files that are password-protected are now skipped with an error message saying the PDF is password-protected rather than a generic “PDF conversion error”.
File Selector: Dollar signs are now allowed in server names in UNC paths so that paths like \wsl$Ubuntu are recognized as valid UNC paths.
File Selector: Predefined configurations for hiding files and folders that contain versioning control data how hide the folders .git (Git), .hg (Mercurial), and .bzr (Bazaar) in addition to .svn (Subversion) and “Sync Issues” (Outlook).
Forum: Conversation and message lists now use the plain text color configured on the Syntax Colors section in the Preferences for consistency with the editor control for the body text of forum messages.
Bug fixes:
Action: A “collect data” action with “search type” set to “regular expression” with a regex that consists entirely of literal text and with a backreference to the entire regex match in the Collect box caused the action to crash.
Action: A search-and-replace failed to start with an access violation error if file sectioning was used with “invert search results” and the search type of the main part of the action was “regular expression” or “free-spacing regular expression” and the search term consists entirely of literal text.
Action: Convert matched files to text overwrote files in proprietary formats with the plain text conversion instead of creating a copy of the file with a .txt extension; but it added the path with the .txt extension to the undo history causing the original file to get a .txt extension and the plain text conversion to remain without the .txt extension when trying to undo the action.
Action: Setting “file sectioning” to “search and collect sections” and leaving the “section collect” empty caused the action to crash instead of using the entire regex match as the section like “search for sections” does.
Action: Using the “target file creation” option to save search matches in combination with the “search” action type and file sectioning caused all the previous matches in the same section to be written again with each following match when multiple matches were found in the same section.
File Selector: Pressing Enter when the Path box has keyboard focus no longer makes a “ding” sound.
Sequence: Searching through files matched by another step didn’t work if those files were found in an archive or mailbox.

New in PowerGREP 5.3.2 (Jul 8, 2022)

Improvement:
Manifest now includes longPathAware to indicate support for paths longer than 260 characters (which PowerGREP has had since version 5.0.0).
Bug fixes:
Action: A search-and-replace failed to start with an access violation error if file sectioning was used with “invert search results” and the search type of the main part of the action was “regular expression” or “free-spacing regular expression”.
Action: Aborting an action could sometimes crash PowerGREP with an access violation error.
Action: Collecting headers and footers with %MATCHCOUNT% in the target file footer produced an incorrect match count if matches from multiple source files were written to the same target file and “order of matches from different files” was set to “no particular order” or to “keep each file’s matches together”.
Action: Searching for a list of regular expressions with all regexes unticked except a single regex that finds zero-length matches with both the options “collect whole sections” and “list only sections matching all terms” ticked never found any matches as if “collect whole sections” was unticked.
Browsing for a folder no longer adds the \? prefix to paths longer than 260 characters; PowerGREP adds this prefix internally if needed before passing long paths to the Windows API.
Compound documents were not copied correctly when a search-and-replace action was configured to make copies of modified files.
File Selector: Unplugging a drive on which you had a file or folder selected on the File Selector panel caused an error when PowerGREP tried to refresh its list of folders and files to reflect the removed drive.
File Selector|File Format Configuration: Moving a custom file format up or down when editing a file format configuration swapped the settings between the format that was moved and the format that it swapped positions with.
File Selector|Search Only Through Files with Results could cause PowerGREP to crash.
File Selector|Text Encoding Configuration: Moving a file format up or down when editing a text encoding configuration swapped the settings between the format that was moved and the format that it swapped positions with.
Filter Files: Requiring all terms to match with “non-overlapping searched” turned off with a list of regexes with named capturing groups in multiple regexes with backreferences in later parts of the action caused PowerGREP to crash.
Placeholders: A single extraneous character at the end of a placeholder option was ignored; e.g. %MATCH:LQ% was interpreted as %MATCH:L%.
Placeholders: Adapt case placeholder option has been removed because it hasn’t worked since it was first introduced in 2006.
Results: Matches at the start of the second and following lines in a block of context that spans multiple lines were not indented when context numbers were shown.
Results: Placing the cursor on the header line with the total number of matches for the action and clicking the Edit File button triggered an access violation error; now the Edit File button simply does nothing in this situation.
Text encodings to read files with: settings for detecting a file’s encoding are no longer used for files that start with a Unicode signature (Byte Order Marker or BOM).
WINE: 64-bit version failed to start on WINE 7.0 (since 5.1.1).

New in PowerGREP 5.3.1 (Sep 21, 2021)

New in PowerGREP 5.3.0 (Apr 7, 2021)

Improvements:
Docs: Command line examples.
File Formats: PowerGREP can now use IFilters that implement IPersistStream instead of IPersistFile.
File Formats: Significantly increased the amount of time PowerGREP will wait for its PDF converter so that larger PDF files can be converted successfully on slower computers.
File Selector|Import: History of recently used regular expressions.
Bug fixes:
Action: Named backreferences were empty when they needed to substitute the match of an unnamed capturing group that got the name of the backreference from a named capturing group with that name in another alternative in a branch reset group.
Editor|Print failed with an “argument out of range” error if Editor|Print had been used before and Editor|Word Wrap was turned off.
File Formats: Outlook MSG files that are attached to other Outlook MSG files are now searched through when you set “file formats to convert to plain text” to include attachments.
File Sectioning: “Invert search results” did not work with the “simple search” action type.
File Selector: Right-clicking a folder and selecting Edit File now opens the folder in Windows Explorer instead of triggering an “invalid class typecast” error.
File Selector|Clear: Clearing a file selection that had file masks and then immediately executing the action caused the file selection to keep using the file masks that were cleared.
File Selector|Import: Preview of the previous import was not cleared when using the Import FIle Listings dialog box a second time.
File Selector|Import: Previewing the list of “file paths found in the selected file” in the Import File Listings dialog was much too slow.
PowerGREP failed to start with an error saying “cannot focus a disabled or invisible window” if PowerGREP was closed with a floating or closed Action panel.
Preferences|Cache: Dialog for selecting the cache folder does not show hidden folders (and thus not the default cache folder which is in the Temp folder inside the AppData folder which is hidden by default).
Results: If making or reverting replacements in a file on the Results panel and then starting a new action (which makes the Results panel try to save its changes and clear itself) resulted in a File Could Not Be Saved prompt (due to the file being read-only, for example) then clicking the Cancel Action button triggered an error instead of canceling the action.

New in PowerGREP 5.2.3 (Sep 30, 2020)

New in PowerGREP 5.2.2 (Jun 24, 2020)

New in PowerGREP 5.2.1 (Feb 4, 2020)

Improvements:
Forum: Attachments can now be renamed while the message they are attached to has not been sent yet.
Pinned panels slide in and out faster.
Bug fixes:
Action: Searching for a single piece of literal text with “whole sections only” turned on never found any matches in files that use an encoding that uses the same number of bytes for every character.
File Selector: Expanding an archive, changing the archive format configuration to one that does search through that archive’s format, then changing the archive format configuration to one that does makes it impossible to expand the same archive again or to search through it until the file selection is refreshed.
File Selector: Invalid file masks were silently ignored if you did not mark an entire drive to be included in the action.
Help window no longer becomes unresponsive if PowerGREP shows a modal dialog box while the help window is already visible.
Match Placeholders: %FILENZ% and %FILENA% counted files starting from one like %FILEN% does instead of counting starting from zero or counting them with letters.
Match Placeholders: The Insert Match Placeholder dialog box did not list %FILEN%, %FILENZ%, and %FILENA%.
Regex: Attempting to execute an action containing a replacement string or text to be collected consisting of two or more valid named backreferences followed by a token that represents the entire regex match caused PowerGREP to hang.
Restoring PowerGREP by clicking the taskbar button gave keyboard focus to a floating panel if there was one instead of giving it to PowerGREP’s main window (5.2.0 only).
Results: Skipping making replacements in a file in a proprietary format because its target file path was already created for another source file during the same action triggered various errors when processing the remaining files in the action.
Searching and replacing through MIME email messages (separate or inside MBOX mailboxes) failed with access violation errors.
Significantly improved the reliability of searching and replacing through files in proprietary formats.

New in PowerGREP 5.2.0 (Sep 6, 2019)

Improvements:
Forum: Long lists of conversations are now loaded faster.
Results/Editor: Search and Replace boxes on the bottom search toolbars now larger, particularly on high DPI systems.
Sequence icons have been changed to make sequences and actions a little easier to distinguish in libraries.
Tweaked some toolbar icons; Sequence icons are a bit more distinct from Action icons; commands for finding the next/previous match within the same file now have arrows that point up and down instead of left and right.
Bug fixes:
Action: xFF escapes in the regular expression or replacement string were substituted with question marks instead of the actual byte in binary files for byte values that are unassigned in the computer's default code page.
Action: File or folder name collect actions failed to create any target files when "target file creation" was set to "save one file for each searched file".
Action: Loading an action from a file, a library, or a sequence sometimes set "target file creation" to "do not save results to file" instead of to the target setting that was stored in the file, library, or sequence.
Action: PowerGREP complained about invalid backup destination or location even after changing the backup type to "no backups".
Action: Turning on file sectioning and then "invert search results" and then changing the action type to "count matches" without turning off file sectioning caused the action to fail with an error; this could be worked around by turning off "invert search results" before changing the action type.
File Selector|Clear Folder and its Files and Subfolders: Using this command on a drive and then marking a folder on the same drive ignores the file masks until the file masks are edited when using the same file masks for all folders.
Fonts scale more evenly on high DPI systems.
Library: File filtering search type was added to the description when not filtering files but not added when disallowing any terms to match; file filtering and context search terms were never added to the description.
Minimizing PowerGREP by clicking the taskbar button did not hide floating panels.
Results/Editor: Regex option on the bottom search toolbars skipped one character between matches.
Results: Making replacements in proprietary formats sometimes failed with an access violation error.
Results: The actual search term is now shown when counting matches of a single regular expression or a single binary search term; previously the search term was indicated as "1".
Results: The value inserted by a match count placeholder such as %MATCHCOUNT:6Z% was off by one; the unpadded placeholder %MATCHCOUNT% was correct.
Results|Save: Results of "collect data" actions with "group results for all files" turned on were not saved correctly; attempting to load them produces an error about invalid XML.
Results|Save: Results of "count matches" actions were not correctly saved into .pgr files.
Setup: Running the installer with the /silent parameter from a command prompt without admin privileges now installs PowerGREP for the current user without an elevation prompt instead of doing nothing.
Silent installs from an elevated command prompt install PowerGREP for all users.
If PowerGREP was previously installed for all users or if the /userall parameter is passed on the command line, then silent installs from a command prompt without admin privileges trigger an elevation prompt.

New in PowerGREP 5.1.7 (Nov 16, 2018)

New in PowerGREP 5.1.6 (Jun 27, 2018)

New in PowerGREP 5.1.5 (May 16, 2018)

New in PowerGREP 5.1.4 (Jan 30, 2018)

New in PowerGREP 5.1.3 (Nov 7, 2017)

New example:
Find bytes that are not part of valid UTF-8 sequences.
Improvements:
Editor: Automatically reloading a file when it was modified by another application now prompts before reloading and preserves the cursor position and selection after reloading.
File Selector: UNC paths now allow @ signs in the server and share names.
Placeholders: %MATCHFILENZ% can now be used in source file footers to collect the number of matches in each file.
Regex: (?(DEFINE)…) should not be a conditional even when there is a group named "DEFINE".
Bug fixes:
Action: Collecting search matches or file names into a single file with "order of matches from different files" was set to anything other than "no particular order" or "keep each file's matches together" collected the text that needs to go between files extraneously at the start of the target file (e.g. when delimiting files and matches with line breaks, there would be an extra line break at the start of the target file).
Action: Paste Escaped now uses the escape rules for replacement strings instead of those for regular expression when pasting into the Replace box.
Action: Source file footers were not collected when "target file creation" was set to "path placeholders" and "group identical matches" was off.
File Selector/Results: Menu items for editing a file in its associated application did not always indicate the correct application.
Placeholders: %FILECOUNT% did not work with all combinations of "target file creation" and "order of matches from different files".
Placeholders: Path placeholders using a placeholder option (such as case conversion) caused "invalid pointer operation" errors when an action completed running if PowerGREP was configured to run actions using multiple threads (which it is by default).
Results: Text collected for matches of the regex z was not shown when displaying matches with context for files that had other matches too.
Results: Text collected for matches of the regexes ^ and $ was not shown when displaying matches with context.
XLSX converter crashes on spreadsheets that contain unusual formulas.

New in PowerGREP 5.1.2 (May 31, 2017)

New in PowerGREP 5.1.1 (May 9, 2017)

New in PowerGREP 5.1.0 (Mar 28, 2017)

New features:
Archive Formats: ext2, ext3, and ext4 disk images.
Archive Formats: HFS+ disk images.
Archive Formats: NTFS disk images.
Archive Formats: RAR archive format now supports the RAR 5.0 format.
Examples: Collect a batch file or script to execute commands on each file.
Help|News & Updates: New version announcements and other news about PowerGREP and optionally other Just Great Software products can now be shown automatically or upon request.
Setup: Per-user installations that don't require admin rights and that can create shortcuts and file associations.
Improvements:
Action: Target files can now overwrite files that have the hidden or system attribute set; previously this failed with an access denied error unless the target was moved to a backup location.
Backup file destination types that place backups in archives now create folder trees inside the archive when a folder is included with its subfolders and the target type is set to modify the original files or to place target files into a folder tree or archive.
Backup file destination types that place backups of files in different folders into the same folder or archive now ensure unique names are used for backups of files with the same name when the backup naming style allows multiple backups of files with a given name.
Backup file destination types that place backups of files in different folders into the same folder or archive now only back up the first file with a given name when the backup naming style always uses the same backup file name; the second and following files will not be modified at all and have an error added to the results.
Clipboard: File listings can now be imported from the clipboard; this allows you to set up an action that searches through the files that were copied to the clipboard by a file manager.
Clipboard: If you copied a list of files to the clipboard using Windows Explorer then the path clipboad:clipboard.txt now contains that list of files.
File Formats: XLS and XLSX files that contain large numbers of blank cells are now converted to plain text much faster.
File Selector: Explore folder command now uses the system's default file manager rather than always using Windows Explorer.
Preferences|External Editors: Options to configure external editors to open files, archives, and/or folders.
Preferences|General: Explorer context menu items now show PowerGREP's icon (to add the icon to existing context menu items, the menu items need to be removed and then recreated).
Sequence: Adding, deleting, and reordering steps now preserves file selection references between steps.
Sequence: Show file selection details for steps that have their own file selection.
Bug fixes:
Action: Collecting search matches or file names into a single file with "order of matches from different files" was set to anything other than "no particular order" or "keep each file's matches together" collected the text that needs to go between files extraneously at the start of the target file (e.g. when delimiting files and matches with line breaks, there would be an extra line break at the start of the target file).
Action: File or folder name collect actions produced no results if "order of matches from different files" was set to anything other than "no particular order".
Action: If the second or following regex in a list of regular expressions had a syntax error and you attempted to preview or execute the action then the first time it would show an appropriate error message but the second time it would fail with an access violation.
Backup files were not created (and thus files were not modified) when you marked a folder inside an archive and set "backup file destionation type" to "folder tree".
File Formats: Currency values in XLS files now correctly show the currency symbol.
File Selector: Selecting a configuration via the (...) button no longer changes the default configuration; default configurations can be selected in the Preferences.
Results|Next File: If the cursor is in the middle of or to the left of a line break or indentation space then Results|Next File went to the next line instead of to the next file.
Sequence: A step that used the file selection from another step which used the file selection from the File Selector did not search through any files at all.

New in PowerGREP 5.0.6 (Jan 26, 2017)

New in PowerGREP 5.0.5 (Jan 6, 2017)

New in PowerGREP 5.0.4 (Dec 15, 2016)

New in PowerGREP 5.0.3 (Nov 24, 2016)

New in PowerGREP 5.0.2 (Oct 31, 2016)

Improvements:
File Formats: Email messages in Outlook PST files that store the message body in RTF or HTML only are now always converted to plain text when not searching through email attachments as PowerGREP already did for Outlook MSG files.
File Formats: Email messages now contain an extra file called headers.txt or 0.txt that contains a plain text conversion of the basic email headers when searching through emails and their attachments.
File Formats: Plain text conversion of email messages in Outlook PST files now includes the same basic headers as the plain text conversion of Outlook MSG files and MIME email messages already did when searching through emails but not through their attachments.
Bug fixes:
About box and trial version messages caused PowerGREP to crash on Windows Vista 64-bit.
Action: %LINEN%, %LINENZ%, %LINENA%, %SECTIONN%, %SECTIONNZ%, and %SECTIONNA% match placeholders were substituted with nothing instead of line numbers.
Action: Renaming a folder with the old and new names being the same but with differences in case caused the folder to be deleted.
Action: Source file footer is collected twice when using "group identical matches" with a "collect data" action that collects the matches from each source file into a separate target file.
Action: Source file header and footer options are no longer shown when using "group matches for all files" as these are not used in this case.
Archive Formats: If an archive contains two files where the path of one file in the archive appears entirely at the start of the path of another file in the archive, then PowerGREP sometimes extracted the file with the longer path when it needed to extract the file with the shorter path.
Command line: /masks parameter attempted to open its last two (out of five) values as files.
Command line: If less than 5 values were passed to the /masks parameter, PowerGREP indicated /masks needs 3 values rather than 5 (it needed only 3 values in PowerGREP 4 but it needs 5 values in PowerGREP 5).
File Formats: Items after a multipart item inside a multipart MIME email were ignored by PowerGREP when searching through emails and their attachments.
File Formats: Searching through some Outlook MSG files caused PowerGREP to hang or crash.
File Formats: Some Outlook PST files failed to be searched through due to PowerGREP not allowing certain areas of the PST file to be missing.
File Selector: File masks that included a compound document did not include the files inside the compound document.
Results: Making or reverting replacements on the Results panel failed with an access violation on files that use one of the new two-way converters that allow replacements to be made in plain text conversions.
Results: No error messages were added to the results for files that could not be overwritten for actions that do not create backup copies.

New in PowerGREP 5.0.1 (Sep 23, 2016)

New in PowerGREP 5.0.0 (Sep 6, 2016)

New features:
Action Type: Count matches: Indicate how many times each search term was matched in each file or in the overall action. This can be used to find out if certain search terms do not occur in any of the files.
Action Type: File or folder name collect: Search through file and/or folder names and collect text using backreferences or path placeholders. This can be used to build scripts or batch files or other file listings that include more than just the path to the file.
Action/Results: Alphanumeric sort option for matches in addition to the alphabetic sort option.
Action: "Convert text files" and "Copy and convert text files" target types for "list files" and "file name search" actions that make text encoding and line break style options available which allow files to be converted to a particular line break style and/or text encoding as well as to save copies of plain text conversions of files in proprietary formats.
Archive Formats: *.lz;*.lzma compressed single files and *.tar.lzma compressed tarballs.
Archive Formats: CPIO archives (read-only), including those compressed with GZip, BZip, LZMA, or XZ.
Archive Formats: MBOX email (qmail, Thunderbird, etc.).
Archive Formats: Outlook Express (*.dbx).
Archive Formats: Outlook mail folder *.pst.
Clipboard: Copy to clipboard target type for all action types that can save results to a single file. PowerGREP will not put more than 100 MB worth of text onto the clipboard to prevent other applications from choking if the clipboard contains more text than they can handle.
Clipboard: Double-clicking a clipboard: path in the Results or right-clicking a node under the Clipboard node in the File Selector and selecting Edit opens the contents of the clipboard in PowerGREP's built-in Editor; saving changes in the Editor updates the clipboard.
Clipboard: File paths in the form of clipboad:clipboard.txt can be used anywhere on the Action panel to point to clipboard data; such paths are also used on the Results panel to indicate search results on the clipboard.
Clipboard: File Selector has a Clipboard node with the currently available clipboard formats as nodes under it which can be marked to make an action operate on the contents of the clipboard.
Command line: /count and /collectname parameters for the new "count matches" and "file or folder name collect" action types.
Editor: File paths in the form of editor:filename.ext can be used anywhere on the Action panel to point to the file open in PowerGREP's built-in editor; such paths are also used on the Results panel to indicate search results in the built-in editor.
Editor: File Selector and an Editor node that lets you mark the contents of the built-in editor as a file (even if the editor has an unsaved file open).
Editor: Reload files modified on disk automatically when switching from another application to PowerGREP or when switching from another panel to the Editor panel within PowerGREP.
Editor: Store in editor target type for all action types that can save results to a single file.
File Formats: AceText collection.
File Formats: Audio files (MP3, FLAC, etc.).
File Formats: CorelDRAW (*.cdr).
File Formats: Custom file formats that can be converted by running a command line application using either standard I/O or temporary files.
File Formats: DOCX files (Word 2007 and later) are now handled by a built-in decoder which allows replacements to be made.
File Formats: HTML files as plain text.
File Formats: JPEG (EXIF).
File Formats: MHT (web page saved as single file by IE) can be converted to plain text or treated as a compound document.
File Formats: ODT files (OpenOffice Writer) are now handled by a built-in decoder which allows replacements to be made.
File Formats: Outlook email message (*.msg) and Outlook attachments (winmail.dat).
File Formats: PDF files can now have their text converted in reading order instead of mimicing the visual page layout.
File Formats: RTF files as plain text.
File Formats: Single email message in MIME format (*.eml) or UUencode format converted to plain text or as a compound document.
File Formats: Windows shell links (*.lnk).
File Formats: XPS and OXPS.
Forum: +1 button that adds a "me too" vote to an issue such as a bug report or feature request.
Forum: Ability to filter down to conversations one participated in.
Forum: Ability to show complete conversations while searching.
Forum: Email notification level that includes conversations that you gave a +1 in addition to conversations that you participated in.
Forum: Server side search to search through the message bodies of all conversations, including ones you haven't viewed.
Library: Update with current settings: Replace the item selected in the library with the settings from the corresponding panel.
Placeholders: %FILECOUNT% can be used in target file footers to write the number of source files that had their matches written to that target file.
Placeholders: %TERMN% placeholder that is replaced with the number of the regular expression in a list of regular expressions that found the match.
Preferences|Cache: Erase cache.
Preferences|Cache: Indicate amount of disk space presently being used by the conversion cache.
Preferences|Cache: Trim cache: Delete all cached conversions of files that have been modified or deleted.
Preferences|File Selector: Files and folders tree now has configurable colors and font.
Regex: .NET-style capturing group subtraction (group balancing).
Regex: h is a shorthand for horizontal whitespace.
Regex: K keeps the text matched so far out of the match results.
Regex: o{377} is now an octal escape and 337 is now an error.
Regex: R matches any line break, including Unicode line breaks, and treats CRLF pairs as indivisible.
Regex: v is now a shorthand for all vertical whitespace instead of a character escape for the vertical tab.
Regex: Branch reset groups.
Regex: Character class intersection [left&&[right]].
Regex: Regular expression recursion and subroutines.
Regex: Relative backreferences k and k.
Regex: Replacement string conditionals in the form of (?1matched:unmatched), (?{name}matched:unmatched), ${1:+matched:unmatched} and ${name:+matched:unmatched}.
Regex: XML shorthand character classes.
Improvements:
Action: Alt+S shows the Action panel as needed and then activates the Search box if pressed when the Action panel is not visible.
Action: Attempting to execute an action that contains a regular expression that is too long for PowerGREP to handle now triggers a clear error message, instead of a crash. Syntax highlighting highlights the tail end of the regex in red to indicate just how much too long the regex is.
Action: Collect data actions that use file sectioning with "collect/replace whole sections" or "invert search results" turned on can now use backreferences to named capturing groups in the text to be collected.
Action: File name search action type was renamed to "file or folder name search" as it can search for folders instead of or in addition to files, with target options to copy/move/delete matching folders as a whole or to copy/move the individual files inside matching folders.
Action: Invert search results for "list files" actions is now shown at the top of the Action panel even when using file sectioning to make it more obvious that it is the list of files that is being inverted, rather than the sections.
Action: Invert search results is now available for "merge files" actions allowing files without search matches to be merged.
Action: Rename files action type was renamed to "rename files or folders" as it can now directly rename folders instead of or in addition to renaming files.
Action: Resize multi-line edit controls automatically based on the number of lines of text they contain to reduce the need to scroll controls with many lines and to reduce space wasted for controls with little or no text.
Archive Formats: Archive format settings are now made in the File Selector rather than in the preferences because the action may depend on them.
Archive Formats: Archives are now globbed during the grepping phase so that the archive needs to be opened only once during the search, resulting in a (much) shorter globbing phase, and better overall performance as the archive needs to be opened only once rather than twice during the search.
Command Line: /masks now takes 5 instead of 3 values to allow inclusion and exclusion masks for folders to be specified.
Command line: /configconvert, /configarchives, /configencoding, and /confighide parameters to use a predefined configuration; /optarchives is no longer supported.
Editor: When saving files that are part of the search results, use the backup naming style from the Action instead of from the Editor Preferences.
File Formats: DOC files that are technically RTF or HTML files rather than Word documents are now converted to plain text instead of triggering an error that the file is not a Word document.
File Formats: DOC files with text in non-Latin scripts are now handled correctly by PowerGREP's built-in converter removing the need to use the IFilter for them.
File Formats: File format settings are now made in the File Selector rather than in the preferences because the action may depend on them.
File Formats: Files that are zero bytes in size are no longer treated as files that require conversion to reduce the number of errors about files that could not be converted.
File Formats: If the conversion cache grows beyond the allowed size while a search is in progress, it is now trimmed to 95% of the allowed size, to avoid having to continuously trim the cache as new files are added.
File Formats: Only cache conversions of files that take a significant amount of time to be converted.
File Formats: PDF conversion is now more reliable.
File Formats: Stop using the conversion cache for the remainder of the action when it is too small to hold the files converted by a single action.
File Formats: Timeout for the PDF, XLS, and IFilter converters adjusts itself to the size of the file being converted to allow very large files to be converted, and to time out sooner when the converter hangs on a small file.
File paths longer than 260 characters are now supported everywhere except in Open and Save dialogs (which are handled by the Windows shell which does not support long paths).
File Selector: Alt+2 and Alt+I show the File Selector panel and then activate the "files and folders" tree or the "include files" editor.
File Selector/Results: Alphanumeric instead of alphabetic sort order so that files and folders with numbers in their names are sorted logically.
File Selector: "Include folders" and "exclude folders" boxes to include or exclude folders and archives from the search based on their names. Excluding folders using "exclude folders" is more efficient than using file masks with backslashes with "exclude files" as PowerGREP does not need to glob folders that are excluded entirely.
File Selector: Changes to settings on the File Selector panel are now applied instantly to the files and folders tree, even after having searched through large numbers of files (e.g. the entire C drive).
File Selector: Commands to mark or exclude files with results are now submenus with options to mark or exclude matched files, unmatched files, or target files.
File Selector: File sizes are no longer rounded to the nearest kiB, MiB, or GiB and numbers beyond 32767 can be entered, making searches for exact file sizes possible. Sizes can now be specified as multiples of 1,000 (kB, MB, GB) as well as multiples of 1,024 (kiB, MiB, GiB).
File Selector: Files that are inside a folder that is included but are excluded by the file format configuration, by an exclusion mask, by file date, or by file size are now indicated with gray X marks instead of having no marks.
File Selector: Generic icons for all files; file-specific icons may be slow to retrieve due to interference by on-access virus scanners like Microsoft Security Essentials.
File Selector: Include Masks and Exclude Masks boxes now reduce their size if they contain little or no text, giving more space to the files and folders tree.
File Selector: Permanent exclusion settings are now labeled as "hide files and folders" since that is what these settings really do to the File Selector panel and to differentiate them from the "exclude files" and "exclude folders" boxes in the File Masks part of the File Selector panel.
File Selector: Permanent exclusion settings are now made in the File Selector rather than in the Preferences because the action may depend on them.
File Selector: Text encoding settings are now made in the File Selector rather than in the Preferences because the action may depend on them.
File Selector: Tick and X marks that indicate whether files are included or excluded are now scaled on high DPI systems, making them the same size as the file and folder icons they sit next to.
Forum: Edited dates are now shown relative to the posted date if the time gap between now and the edited date is larger than the time gap between the posted date and the edited date.
Forum: Editing the summary of a message now also updates the subject of the conversation if it is the same as the old summary of the message.
Forum: Reply dates are now shown relative to the starting date if the time gap between now and the reply is larger than the time gap between the reply and the start of the conversation.
Forum: Sort attachments by clicking column headers in the list.
Placeholders: %FILESIZEKB%, %FILESIZEMB%, and %FILESIZEGB% now use multiples of 1,000 with the new placeholders %FILESIZEKIB%, %FILESIZEMIB%, and %FILESIZEGIB% using multiples of 1,024.
Placeholders: %MATCHCOUNT% can now be used in source and target file footers to write the number of matches found in the source file or the number of matches written to the target file.
Placeholders: %GUID1% through %GUID9% which allow up to nine GUIDs to be inserted in multiple places by an action or sequence and remain constant throughout the execution of the action or sequence, but change each time the action or sequence is executed.
Placeholders: %GUIDFILE% which allows the same GUID to be inserted multiple times in a file, while inserting a different GUID in each file.
Placeholders: Placeholder options are now supported on backreference placeholders in regular expressions.
Placeholders: Placeholders with details about the action or the current file are now supported in "collect headers and footers".
Preferences|File Selector: Default choices for file formats, archive formats, text encodings, and permanent exclusion that are used when clearing the file selection and when starting PowerGREP without a file selection.
Regex: Invalid backreferences in the replacement string are now treated as errors that prevent the action from being executed.
Results: Use fountain colors even when grouping unique matches.
Results: When making replacements, use the backup naming style from the Action instead of from the Editor Preferences.
Sequence: Commands to directly load/store file selections and actions from/into a library.
Splitter positions on the Library, Undo History, and Forum panels are preserved when restarting PowerGREP and when saving custom layouts.
Toolbar icons now support all 10 display scaling settings from 100% to 400% available in the basic display settings in Windows, allowing PowerGREP to properly scale its toolbars on all PC and laptop displays on the market today.
Undo History: Track folders that were created, and remove those folders if they are empty after undoing the action.
Windows 10: Mouse wheel scrolls the control pointed to by the mouse pointer instead of the control that has keyboard focus.

New in PowerGREP 4.7.1 (Jun 14, 2016)

New in PowerGREP 4.7.0 (Sep 24, 2015)

New in PowerGREP 4.6.5 (May 4, 2015)

New in PowerGREP 4.6.4 (Jan 26, 2015)

New in PowerGREP 4.6.3 (Dec 17, 2014)

New in PowerGREP 4.6.2 (Sep 8, 2014)

New in PowerGREP 4.6.1 (Jun 9, 2014)

New in PowerGREP 4.6.0 (Nov 26, 2013)

New in PowerGREP 4.5.1 (Jun 7, 2013)

New in PowerGREP 4.5.0 (Mar 26, 2013)

Improvements:
Action: Do not highlight matching brackets in literal text as doing so may confuse the user into thinking they have a special meaning, which they don't.
File Selector: Automatically add and remove drive letters as they are added and removed in Windows.
Forum: SOCKS proxy server support.
Results: Make/Revert Replacements commands now show a progress meter when processing more than one file.
Results: Make/Revert Replacements in All Files are now disabled for actions that produce more search matches than PowerGREP can hold in memory at a time, because PowerGREP won't be able to make or revert the replacements that didn't fit into memory.
Results: Setting the same bookmark at the same position removes it; setting a different bookmark at the same position sets it and removes the old bookmark.
Results|Export: Exported HTML files now include a Content-Type meta tag to indicate the character set.
Bug fixes:
Action: Insert File now converts line breaks to CRLF to make sure that loading a list with delimited search terms works correctly even if the file uses a different line break style.
Action: Paste Escaped does nothing when the clipboard holds text copied by the same PowerGREP instance.
Action: Search-and-replace or search-and-delete with the 3 options "file sectioning", "invert search results", and "context type" turned on caused the replacements to be made incorrectly.
Command line: Specifying an empty string "" as the encoding caused PowerGREP to crash.
File Formats: Excel converter no longer crashes on files that are open in Excel.
File Formats: Files in proprietary formats that could not be converted because another application has a lock on them are no longer added to the conversion cache as files that cannot be converted; when you try to search the file again PowerGREP will attempt the conversion again instead of saying the file could not be converted previously.
File Formats: PowerGREP sometimes crashed with an out of memory error when trying to decode a WordPerfect document.
Insert path placeholders: Example column is empty until you edit the example path.
Preferences, File Formats: Maximum cache size while not running caused the cache to be trimmed each time an action that searched through files in proprietary formats completed running instead of only when closing PowerGREP if you did not open a file in a proprietary format in PowerGREP's built-in editor.
Preferences, File Formats: The file masks you specified for "Only use IFilter for..." and "Never use IFilter for..." were only used after you clicked OK in the Preferences. Next time you restarted PowerGREP it would use the default file masks, even though the Preferences dialog remembered your file masks.
Regex: Zero-repeated groups like (group){0} were matched as if they were optional groups like (group){0,1}.
Results: Double-clicking context or a context number in the results of a search-and-replace correctly opened the target file in PowerGREP's built-in editor, but did not always correctly select the context that was double-clicked.
Results: Making or reverting replacements did not update the highlighting if the replacements were made in copies of the files rather than in the original files, and the file the replacements were made or reverted in was not open on the Editor panel.

New in PowerGREP 4.4.0 (Nov 1, 2012)

New features:
Placeholders: %FILEN% placeholder that is incremented for each file searched through, allowing unique sequential IDs to be generated for each file.
Placeholders: %GUID% inserts a newly generated GUID into the replacement text; each replacement will get a different GUID.
Improvements:
64-bit: Indicate x86, x64, or WOW64 in the About box to indicate whether you're running the 32-bit version on 32-bit Windows, the 64-bit version on 64-bit Windows, or the 32-bit version on 64-bit Windows.
File Selector: The Search Archives option is now remembered when you restart PowerGREP, even if you turn off the option to remember the file selection in the File Selector section in the Preferences.
Import File Listing dialog now automatically gets scrollbars if it is too large to fit on the screen, which may happen when using large fonts or a small screen.
Undo History: Disable commands that work on a selection in the undo history when the Undo History panel is closed.
Windows 8: Uninstall shortcut is no longer pinned to the start screen by the installer (but it won't unpin any shortcuts that were previously pinned).
Bug fixes:
Action: Collect data actions that used line breaks as the delimiter between matches stopped adding those line breaks if a file used a different encoding than the previous file processed by the same thread.
Archives: "List files" actions without a search term failed to delete, copy, or move files found inside archives.
Command Line: /delimitprefix, /delimitsearch, and /delimitreplace now interpret the strings "Line break", "Tab", and "None" in the same way the drop-down lists on the Action panel interpret them: as an actual line break, tab, or a blank string.
Placeholders: Path placeholders in the search term did not work correctly if the search was case insensitive and the part of the path represented by the placeholder contained uppercase letters.
Preferences, General: Removing folder associations did not work.
Results: Alt+F6 key combinations for replacing and reverting matches had no effect on the Results panel.
Sequence: Executing a sequence and then executing a separate action and then double-clicking a step in the sequence to load its results sometimes caused access violation errors in the File Selector when expanding folders that had results in the separate action but not in the sequence step.
Undo History: Ctrl+A when the undo history list has keyboard focus now selects all items in the undo history instead of selecting the whole contents of the file on the Editor panel.
Windows 8: Toolbar combo boxes did not properly display their drop-down arrows.

New in PowerGREP 4.3.3 (Apr 30, 2012)

New in PowerGREP 4.3.2 (Apr 6, 2012)

New in PowerGREP 4.3.1 (Feb 24, 2012)

New in PowerGREP 4.3.0 (Feb 16, 2012)

New features:
64-bit: PowerGREP's installer now automatically installs a 64-bit version of PowerGREP on 64-bit Windows. This allows PowerGREP to use all of your PC's available RAM, and allows the IFilter system to be used on 64-bit Windows.
Archives: Disk images of FAT volumes such as floppy disks.
Archives: Files and tarballs compressed with XZ (*.xz) (read and write).
Archives: ZIPX archives using the PPMd and LZMA compression methods used by the latest version of WinZip. PowerGREP will read ZIP and ZIPX archives using the Deflate, PPMd, and LZMA compression methods. PowerGREP will use the Deflate method when creating ZIP files, and the PPMd method when creating ZIPX files. The extensions for the ZIP and ZIPX formats can be configured separately in the preferences.
Preferences, Action: Option to use a certain amount of RAM to keep temporary files in memory instead of writing them to the Temp folder, speeding up actions that use temporary files (such as searching through archives).
Improvements:
Archives: Aborting an action while PowerGREP is decompressing or compressing a large archive now aborts the (de)compression operation cleanly and immediately.
Archives: Do not unzip all files from an archive at once if they are too large to fit into the RAM space for temporary files and the archive is not in a format that uses solid archives.
Dockable panels: New mechanism for docking panels makes it easier to position panels exactly where you want. Instead of moving the mouse pointer to an invisible area next to the edge of another panel, you now move the mouse pointer to icons that appear in the center of the panel that you're dragging over.
Forum: The button to delete messages is now labeled Cancel for messages that are being edited, to make it more obvious that this button deletes the edited message, but leaves the original message in place.
Results: Show an explanation on the Results panel during the globbing process so new users don't wonder why the search is stuck at 0% for a long time.
Uninstalling PowerGREP now deletes the conversion cache folder and the temporary files folder.
Bug fixes:
Action: Setting "file sectioning" to anything but "whole file" or "line by line" and then changing "action type" to "simple search" now properly changes the file sectioning to "line by line" instead of using the previously selected option that became unavailable in the interface.
Action: The text cursor in the Replace and Comments boxes did not change to reflect insert and overwrite mode.
Archives: *.tar.bz2 and *.tar.gz files were treated as single compressed files instead of as compressed tar archives when the *.bz2 and *.gz extensions were specified for the single compressed BZip2 and GZip formats (as they are by default).
Archives: Attempting to add a read-only file to an archive resulted in an "access denied" error even though read access is available.
Archives: Zero-length files are not extracted.
Command line: /save parameter failed to save the results unless the file had a .pgr or .pgsr extension.
Editor: Search matches were highlighted incorrectly (highlighting was offset from the actual matches) after a search-and-replace using multiple search terms with "non-overlapping search" turned off.
Editor: Syntax highlighting colors are incorrect when highlighting search matches in a file and different color palettes have been selected for the Editor and the Results.
File Formats: PowerGREP failed to terminate the XLS converter process after certain crashes in the converter, showing an access violation error on the Results panel, and causing errors saying "cannot send file to the converter process" on the following XLS and XLSX files.
File Selector: Marking a folder with a red X and marking a folder inside that folder with a green tick should search through the folder with the green tick. The File Selector panel indicated this correctly, but the actual search did not always go down folders marked with a red X.
File Selector: Right-clicking on an archive and selecting Edit File now opens Windows Explorer with the archive selected instead of opening Windows Explorer at the My Documents folder.
Results: Shift+Ctrl+E does not open the file selected in the Results in EditPad.
Undo manager kept archive files open longer than needed, preventing archives that were created or modified by an action in the undo history from being deleted or modified again unless the action was undone first.

New in PowerGREP 4.2.4 (Oct 17, 2011)

New in PowerGREP 4.2.3 (Sep 26, 2011)

New in PowerGREP 4.2.2 (Jul 20, 2011)

Improvements:
File Selector/Results: Move Files and Copy Files commands now preserve the target and backup settings between PowerGREP sessions, including the target and backup location histories.
File Selector: Ignore unquoted spaces before and after each file mask in the Include Files and Exclude Files boxes.
Results: Edit with EditPad command now works with EditPad Lite 7 and EditPad Pro 7. It still works with EditPad Pro 4, 5, and 6, but gives preference to version 7 if you run more than one version.
Results: Increased the timeout for the PDF and XLS converters so larger files can be converted.
Results: Opening a compressed file in an external editor now adds the file's extension to the name of the temporary file that it is decompressed to so that editors that look at the file extension see the proper extension.
Results: Right-clicking in the results but not on a highlighted match and selecting Edit with EditPad Pro should select the line or block of context in EditPad just like it does with the built-in editor when double-clicking.
Results: Search toolbar should also search through the bottom half of the Results panel with the results details or errors.
Bug fixes:
Action: File name search actions did not properly trap errors when copying and moving files.
Action: Loading an action that uses a very long delimited list of literal text caused PowerGREP to appear to hang if the search type was previously set to regular expression before loading the action.
Action: Search-and-replace actions that modify original files and create backup files failed on zipped documents with an error about being unable to create the backup.
Action: Searching through empty files caused access violation errors to be listed in the results.
Action: Target type "save list of matching files to target files" did not work for the action type "file name search".
Action: Turning on "filter files" without entering a search term to filter with caused the action to fail with an access violation error instead of showing a helpful message about the blank search text like PowerGREP does for the other parts of the action.
Archive Formats: .gz files that consist of multiple concatenated .gz files are now correctly decompressed as a single file like gunzip does rather than failing with a CRC error.
Creating a portable installation via the Help menu did not copy over PowerGREP4PDF.exe and PowerGREP4XLS.exe which PowerGREP needs to convert PDF and Excel files.
Editor: Replacing or reverting matches in hexadecimal mode failed with an access violation.
File Formats: Improved decoding of XLS and XLSX files allowing files to be decoded that PowerGREP previously failed to decode.
File Selector: Keep the same file or folder selected when the search completes and the File Selector is updated with the results.
Preferences, Results Colors: Double-clicking in the results sample no longer results in an access violation but simply selects the word you double-clicked on.
Regex: ^ and $ matched after and before U+2026 which they shouldn't, and didn't match before and after U+0085 which they should (4.x.x only).
Results: Search options did not show tick marks to indicate which ones are active.
Results: Updating results after running an action or loading a .pgr file took far too long when tens of thousands of files needed to be sorted.
Undo manager: Undo manager locked up when PowerGREP added an undoable action that modified files on a drive that could not be monitored for directory changes. This caused PowerGREP itself to also lock up until the undo manager was killed via the task manager.

New in PowerGREP 4.2.1 (Mar 1, 2011)

New feature:
Editor: Ctrl+] to go to the matching bracket, Ctrl+[ to select between matching brackets, and Ctrl+Shift+] to insert a matching bracket.
Improvements:
Action: Right-click menu for the edit box for headers and footers in collected files.
Print: Text Layout Configuration now lists printer fonts when activated from the print preview and "allow bitmapped fonts" is turned on.
Rich text is no longer placed on the clipboard for selections larger than 1 megabyte.
Toolbar controls now show tooltips when another toolbar control has keyboard focus.
Bug fixes:
Action: Lists of regular expressions that included a regex that consisted of nothing but a comment were not handled correctly; now such regexes are ignored like blank list items.
Action: The (...) button for the target location did not work when the target type was set to "path placeholders".
Action: The mode modifiers (?i) and (?-i) were ignored in regular expressions that (aside from the mode modifier) consits entirely of literal text.
Action: Using the "line by line" sectioning and "invert search results" caused an AV when used with the "simple search" action type.
Copying the hexadecimal representation of bytes and pasting them as text now works correctly for bytes >= 0x80.
File Formats: Non-ASCII characters in WordPerfect documents were either mixed up or missing in PowerGREP's text conversion; now PowerGREP supports all 14 WordPerfect character sets supported by WordPerfect X5.
Keyboard: On keyboards that use the AltGr key, pressing AltGr and E, F, N, O, P, or S did nothing.
Preferences, Text Encoding: ASCII+&htmlchar; encoding now correctly inserts and replaces non-ASCII characters in target files.
Preferences, Text Encoding: If "detect HTML charset meta tag" was on and the file did not actually contain a meta tag, PowerGREP always detected UTF-8 and UTF-16 files without a BOM as well as ASCII files using Unicode escapes, even if those two options were turned off.
Preferences, Text Encoding: The "ASCII + NCR" encodings did not work correctly with small files that fit into memory entirely, causing the NCR references to remain untranslated.
Preferences, Text Encoding: VIQR encoding no longer crashes on files that contain bytes > 126 (which never occur in a proper VIQR file).
Preferences, Text Layout: Setting "add X pixels of extra space between lines" to a non-zero value sometimes caused part of the text to be positioned incorrectly.
Rich text copied by PowerGREP can now be pasted in Outlook Express.

New in PowerGREP 4.2.0 (Jan 12, 2011)

New features:
Action Type: File name search: Search through the names of files instead of their contents (like rename files but without a replacement text).
Command line: /file and /fileexclude parameters to mark individual files to be included in or excluded from the action.
Command line: /folderexclude parameter to mark folders to be excluded from the action, complementing the existing /folder and /folderrecurse parameters.
Command line: /searchtextfile and /searchbytesfile parameters to load a delimited list of search terms from a file, similar to grep -f.
Path placeholders: %FILENAMENOGZ% is the same as %FILENAMENOEXT% if the file has a .gz or .bz2 extension, or the same as %FILENAME% if it does not have such an extension.
Preferences, Action: Option to ingore the read-only flag on files.
Preferences, Editor: Add detailed automatic folding points from the file navigation scheme.
Sequence: Check All and Uncheck All commands in the right-click menu to activate or deactivate all the steps in the sequence.
View, Lock Toolbars: Prevent moving the toolbars by accident.
Improvements:
Action: %MATCHTERMN%, %MATCHFILETERMN% and %MATCHSECTIONTERMN% are now supported in the search term too.
Action: Backreferences in replacement text that refer to capturing groups that do not exist are now highlighted as errors.
Action: Turning on "match whole sections only" now automatically turns on "collect/replace whole sections" to make it obvious that matching whole sections causes them to be collected and replaced as a whole as well.
File Selector/Results: Exploring a file's folder now selects the file in Windows Explorer.
Sequence: If multiple actions in the sequence modify the same file, create only one backup copy of that file. This allows "single" backup options to work correctly with sequences and avoids needless backups of intermediate steps with "multiple" backup options.
Undo History: Undo items for sequences store the file selection if the sequence has steps that use the File Selector instead of their own file selection, so the Use Action or Sequence item can restore the file selection to the File Selector.
Bug fixes:
Action: Action date, file date, and file size placeholder values were off by one.
Action: Backreferences in regular expressions to named capturing groups that were carried over from other parts of the action were highlighted as errors even though they worked correctly.
Action: Execute and Quick toolbar buttons did not always show the correct caption after starting PowerGREP or after restoring a saved layout.
Action: Grouping unique matches failed to group all the occurrences of the first match that was found.
Action: History menu for the filter files part of the action was not assigned, causing an access violation error when clicking the triangle button.
Action: Literal text searches using placeholders in the search term did not work correctly if the search was not case sensitive.
Action: Placeholders did not work when used in a regular expression.
Action: Renaming a file that only changed its case caused the file to be renamed or moved into its backup location instead of being renamed; if backups were disabled, nothing happened.
Action: Splitting files using a regular expression did not correctly split binary files. Some bytes 0x80 and above were replaced with question marks in the target files.
Action: The read-only attribute on existing target files was ignored, causing files to be overwritten anyway when the option to make backups is turned on, and causing PowerGREP to silently fail to make replacements in read-only files when the option to make backups is turned off.
Command line: /save result.pgsr saved only the results of the last step in the sequence instead of the results of the entire sequence.
File Selector: Compound file formats like CHM files could not be excluded using the Exclude Files file masks.
File Selector: Refreshing the file selection (automatically or on command) did not update files or folders that were renamed to the same name with a change in case only.
Preferences, Syntax Colors: Changes in syntax coloring file masks lost their effect when restarting PowerGREP unless the preferences screen was OK'd again.
Results, Print: The last bit of text was missing from the printout.
Sequence: If a step bases its file selection on another step, changing the number of the other step did not update that number in the list of steps, even though the step was correctly updated in the actual sequence.
Undo History: Errors caused by invalid archives should not cause the undo manager to stop working.

New in PowerGREP 4.1.3 (Sep 24, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 4.1.2 (Aug 13, 2010)

Improvements:
Archives: Improved handling of errors caused by invalid archives.
File Formats: New decoder for Microsoft Excel that supports the XLS and XLSX formats and should be more reliable than the old decoder.
Library: Ctrl+F, F3 and Shift+F3 can now be used to search through the library.
PowerGREP can now use up to 4 GB of memory per instance on 64-bit versions of Windows. Previously this was 2 GB.
Preferences, Text Encoding: HTML meta tag check for determining the file's encoding now supports the new HTML5 charset meta tag.
Results: Aborting an action now takes no longer than 10 seconds. Any threads still busy 10 seconds after clinking the abort button are killed.
Vista & 7: PowerGREP now correctly scales itself when the font size has been increased by more than 125% (i.e. the display resolution is set to more than 120 DPI).
Bug fixes:
Action: Changing the search type between "delimited" and "list" caused an internal inconsistency in the action definition which sometimes caused errors when attempting to save or execute the action (since version 4.1.0 which splits up or recomposes the delimited search terms).
Action: Displaying extra context after matches did not work when using sections as context.
Action: Filtering out files did not work in version 4.1.1. All files were searched..
Archives: Zipped documents were skipped if the folder containing them wasn't previously globbed and the IFilter option was turned off.
Editor: Editing a file with highlighted search matches caused the matches to be shifted incorrectly (4.1.1 only).
Editor: Making replacements using backreferences via the Search toolbar on the Editor panel failed with an AV.
File Formats: PowerGREP now correctly searches plain text files that have a .wri extension or are otherwise configured to be read as a Microsoft Write files.
File Selector, Search Only through Files with Results never searched through any files.
File Selector: Importing file listings ignored UNC paths with spaces in the server or share name.
Preferences were not loaded when silently executing an action from the command line.
Results: Clearing the results while the results display is being updated releases the results without clearing the results display, causing errors when trying to click on the results.

New in PowerGREP 4.1.1 (Jul 8, 2010)

New feature:
Command line: /nocache parameter that can be used on combination with /silent to temporarily disable the conversion cache. Files in proprietary formats will be reconverted even if they were cached before, and won't be added to the cache. The conversion manager will not be used.
New examples in the help file:
Put anchors around URLs that are not already inside a tag or anchor.
Rename files based on HTML title tags. Shows how you can use the rename files "action type" with the "filter files" feature to use part of a file's contents to rename a file.
Sequence to update files from 2010 to 2011: copy files under a new name, then search-and-replace the targets.
Improvements:
IFilters are now always called from PowerGREP's main thread. Some IFilters do not always work correctly unless they're called from the application's main thread. This includes the Office 2007 IFilters, causing Office 2007 files to be skipped as binary files if the option to use the IFilter is turned on.
Preferences, File Formats: Setting the maximum size of the conversion cache while PowerGREP is running to zero now completely disables the PowerGREP conversion manager.
Preferences, File Formats: The default IFilter options now has "decode binary files" turned on and "only use IFilter for" set to *.ppt so that PowerPoint files will be searched using the IFilter.
Results: Threads that become unresponsive are no longer forcibly terminated after one minute. While this feature (introduced in PowerGREP 4.0.0) was intended to make PowerGREP more reliable by making sure it doesn't lock up if it gets stuck on a particular file, it seems to have actually made PowerGREP less stable. Threads that are forcibly terminated cannot clean up after themselves.
Uninstaller now cleans up the settings stored in %APPDATA%/JGsoft/PowerGREP 4.
Bug fixes:
Action, Extra processing: Group placeholders that specified placeholder options such as %GROUP1:L% did not work correctly.
Action: Collecting search matches into target files with "group identical matches" turned on resulted in a double BOM being written if the target file was a Unicode file configured to have a BOM.
Action: Creating target files using path placeholders failed for the second and following files if the target folder did not yet exist.
Action: List only sections matching all terms did not work correctly.
Action: Setting "order of collected matches" to sort the files in a particular way when collecting search matches into a single target file caused PowerGREP to fail to write anything to the target file.
Action: Using the Preview or Rename (but not not Quick Rename) buttons to run a "rename files" action caused PowerGREP to leak 64K of memory for each file that needed to be renamed.
Command line: When using the /silent parameter to execute an action that is set to not create backup copies when overwriting files PowerGREP 4.1.0 crashed after completing the action unless the /noundo parameter was also used. Now /noundo is implied when the action does not create backups.
File Selector: Including or excluding files did not work correctly when using more than one traditional file mask and a file mask containing a backslash was listed before another file mask not containing a backslash.
File Selector: The Path box ignored UNC paths with spaces in the server or share name.
PowerGREP is now more conservative with memory when searching through very large files. Previously this was based on available memory. Now there is a fixed 50 MB limit. This makes sure PowerGREP doesn't run out of memory when multiple threads open multiple very large files at the same time.
Results: Storing the results of a search-and-replace or search-and-delete action is much too slow when collecting context.
Text copied to the clipboard by PowerGREP 4.1.0 could not be pasted into applications that support rich text if the copied text did not have any changes in syntax coloring.

New in PowerGREP 4.1.0 (Jul 8, 2010)

New features:
Command line: /context parameter to specify whether to use sections or lines as context, or no context at all.
Command line: /contextextra parameter to specify extra context before and after.
Command line: /noundo parameter to skip saving the undo history even when backup files are created.
Command line: /noundomanager parameter to save the undo history directly to a file without using the undo manager.
Command line: /reuse parameter to reuse a previous PowerGREP instance, if there is one, and if it isn't busy.
Copying text to the clipboard now includes an additional rich text clipboard format that preserves PowerGREP's syntax coloring and match highlighting when pasted into a rich text editor or word processor.
Preferences, Editor: Option to allow next/previous match commands to advance to the next/previous file.
Improvements:
Action: Changing the search type from "delimited" to "list" or back splits up or recomposes the delimited search terms.
Command line: When using the /silent parameter PowerGREP no longer adds the action to the undo history if the action is set to not create backup copies when overwriting files. Previously, all actions that create or overwrite files were added.
File Selector: Tooltip for folders now indicate the total size of the files in the folder in addition to the number of files in the folder.
Preferences, File Selector: The default permanent exclusion mask (on new PowerGREP installs) is now the regex /.bak/d*$;/.~[^.]*$;^Backup [0-9]+ of;^Working copy of which better matches the names of backup files created by PowerGREP. A file or folder simply called "backup" is no longer excluded by default.
Results, Export: Allow any encoding supported by PowerGREP to be chosen.
Results: Check memory usage while a file is being processed rather than only when PowerGREP is done with a file to prevent out of memory errors if a single file has more matches than PowerGREP can display.
Results: Display a detailed error message for out of memory exceptions (when PowerGREP really runs out of memory unexpectedly rather than hitting the memory usage limit set in the preferences).
Results: Pressing Enter when the cursor is over a file name or a match opens the file in the default editor, just like double-clicking does.
The keyboard shortcut for Redo was changed to Ctrl+Y to be more in line with other Windows applications; the old Ctrl+R keyboard shortcut still works.
New examples in the help file:
Extra processing on the whole target file rather than on individual search matches.
Split and merge log files by date.
Bug fixes:
Action: Executing a search-and-replace or search-and-delete action with the "collect/replace whole sections" option turned on failed with an access violation error. Preview and Quick Execute did work correctly.
Action: Search histories (black triangle above boxes for search terms) did not persist when closing and restarting PowerGREP.
Action: The "copy all searched files" target type caused the action to fail if no replacements were made in some of the searched files.
Action: The "copy modified files" and "copy all searched files" target types failed if a zipped document such as a DOCX or XLSX file was marked (green tick) directly in the File Selector.
Action: Using Quick Execute for "split files" actions or "collect files" actions using "path placeholders" for "target file creation" caused matches to be written without delimiters regardless of the "between collected text" setting if "order of collected matches" was set to "no particular order".
Archive: PowerGREP failed to open gzip archives that include the file name of the original file.
Editor: Next/Previous File did not move through the files in the order they have on the Results panel and did not skip files without matches when those aren't being shown on the Results panel.
File Selector: Files and folders tree did not adjust itself to the width of the File Selector panel when the file masks and time settings were hidden.
File Selector: The Path box ignored UNC paths with characters other than letters, digits, or dollar signs in the server or share name.
Results, Clear: Clearing the results did not clear the bottom area with errors or match details.
Results/Editor: F3 keyboard shortcuts for quick searches on the Results and Editor panels were not handled correctly or at all depending on which part of PowerGREP had keyboard focus.
Results: Replacements were not displayed for matches that spanned multiple lines or blocks of context when showing matches with context, in original order, separating match and replacement.

New in PowerGREP 4.0.6 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 4.0.5 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 3.5.8 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 4.0.4 (Apr 10, 2010)

Improvements:
Archives are now created after the grepping process for most actions so each archive is written at most once. This saves time and allows newly created 7-zip archives to be solid. It does increase memory and temporary file usage.
Literal line breaks in regular expressions (inserted by pressing Enter, as opposed to typing \r\n) now match a line break in any style (Windows, UNIX, or Mac) rather than only a Windows-style line break.
Bug fixes:
Action: Check All and Uncheck All items in the context menu of lists of search terms did not correctly select or deselect the search terms even though they correctly updated the checkboxes.
Action: Search-and-replace and search-and-delete actions did not skip files read through an IFilter. Such files should be skipped as the IFilter system is read-only.
Action: Search-and-replace using a (delimited) list of search terms with "non-overlapping search" turned off failed with an access violation if one of the search terms did not find any matches.
Editor, Save As: Saving a huge file under a new name correctly saved the file but corrupted PowerGREP's view of the file if parts of the file after the first insertion or deletion in the file were swapped out to disk when saving.
File masks with multiple adjacent spaces matched only a single space for each block of spaces in the file mask.
File Selector: Folder totals were not indicated after executing an action.
Preferences, Editor: Selecting a different text layout had no effect.
Preferences, Editor: The list of file navigation schemes wasn't properly cleared causing schemes to be listed repeatedly and triggering "index out of bounds" errors when selecting a duplicate.
Results: Double-clicking a (green) highlighted replacement opened the source file instead of the target file if a non-overlapping search caused the replacement to be made after another match was already replaced further down in the file.
Undo: If an action renamed a file adding or removing a .bz2 or .gz extension thus compressing or decompressing the file then undoing that action renamed the file back without undoing the compression or decompression.

New in PowerGREP 3.5.7 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 4.0.3 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 4.0.2 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 3.5.6 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 4.0.1 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 4.0.0 (Apr 10, 2010)

Action Type: Delete search matches. Though this can be achieved with a search-and-replace with a blank replacement text, "delete search matches" is more convenient when using a delimited list of search terms, so there's no need to append a search pair delimiter to each search term.
Action Type: Merge files: Like a collect data action, but saves the entire file rather than just search matches. Can be used without a search text. Can be used with a replacement text to determine the target file.
Action Type: Quick Search: Like Display Search Matches, but with far fewer options to simplify the user interface
Action Type: Rename Files. Search and replace through file names rather than through file contents. Renaming files allows you to automatically zip or unzip files by renaming file.ext to archive.zip::file.ext or vice versa. By filtering files based on their contents using a regular expression with a named capturing group, you can use text from the file in the file's name by using a backreference to the named capturing group from the filter.
Action Type: Split Files: Works like a collect data action that always collects the entire search match (or the entire section if that option is used). Instead of the text to be collected, the "replacement text" is the path to the file where the match or section should be saved.
Action: Backup destination type "subfolder of original folder" that puts the backup file in a subfolder of the folder containing the file being overwritten.
Action: Collect data action type now has the option to only list files matching all search terms
Action: Collect data target type: path placeholders. This differs from the "save one file for each searched file" target type + "path placeholders" target destination combination in that the "path placeholders" target type can combine text collected from several files into a single file if the path placeholders resolve to the same target file for multiple source files, while "save one file for each searched file" would overwrite that file repeatedly, collecting only text from the last file searched.
Action: Collect data: Specify headers and footers to be collected for each input file and/or each output file; specify different text to be inserted between matches from the same file and matches from different files. These settings replace the "delimiter for collected items" setting, which is now "nothing", "line break", or "same text between all collected text" for the "between "collected text" setting.
Action: Copy and paste items under the downward pointing arrow button above the Search box to copy the entire search term or list of search terms, along with any replacement text.
Action: Delete duplicates option for the delete search matches action type to delete only the second and following matches of each search term, or te delete only duplicate matches (comparing the matched text). Matches that turn out not to be duplicates are shown in the results as being replaced with themselves.
Action: Display search matches action type now has the ability to create target files. Though this can be achieved with a "collect data" action with a blank text to be collected, "display search matches" is more convenient when using a delimited list of search terms, so there's no need to append a search pair delimiter to each search term.
Action: Filter files to halt processing on files that (don't) match one or more search terms or grab various parts of a file to use in the regular expression or replacement text via named capture.
Action: List Files now has an option to save a list of full paths, relative paths, or file names only into the target file.
Action: Lists: Check All and Uncheck All commands in the right-click menu for the checkboxes in lists of search terms.
Action: Lists: Cut, copy, and paste commands for search terms in a list of search terms to cut/copy/paste the label, search term, and replacement text (if any) all at once.
Action: Paste Escaped context menu item to paste the text on the clipboard with any regular expression metacharacters in it automatically escaped.
Archives: 7-zip (read and write)
Archives: ARJ (read only)
Archives: CAB files (Microsoft cabinet) (read only)
Archives: CD and DVD disk images using the ISO and UDF file systems (read only)
Archives: DEB packages (read only)
Archives: Files compressed with GZip (*.gz) and BZip2 (*.bz2) (read and write)
Archives: LHA and LZH (read only)
Archives: RAR (read only)
Archives: RPM packages (read only)
Archives: TAR files, including .tgz, .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 (read and write)
Archives: WIM files (Windows Imaging) (read only)
Assistant: Right-click on the assistant or use the General section in the Preferences to choose whether the assistant displays the hint for the control the mouse is pointing to or the control that has keyboard focus. When the mouse is over the assistant, it always displays the control that has keyboard focus.
Assistant: Right-click on the assistant to select a different font or font size. Can also be set in the General section in the Preferences.
Command line parameter to mark a single file for searching, so PowerGREP can be added to the right-click menu of files as well as folders.
Command line parameter to run PowerGREP silently.
Context: Context can be configured independently from file sectioning. E.g. when sections are very large, you can choose to show just one line of context for each match, instead of the whole section. To get PowerGREP 3's results, set the "context type" to "use sections for context".
Context: Context type that does not show any kind of context; speeds up the search and reduces memory consumption for searches with large numbers of matches. Use this option when you want to see matches in the results, but don't want to see any context information.
Context: Expand to whole lines option that displays lines with line numbers as context, regardless of the context or sectioning type.
Context: Fixed record length. This context type is particularly useful for binary files. Set the length to the number of bytes your hex editor displays on a single row to get the same view in the results in PowerGREP.
Context: Show extra context before and/or after the match. You can specify how many extra lines, sections, or context blocks depending on the context type and whether context is expanded to whole lines.
Editor: Code folding, manual and automatic based on indentation or file navigation scheme.
Editor: Make All Replacements and Revert All Replacements to process all replacements in the file at once.
Editor: Make and revert replacements by double-clicking on highlighted matches.
Editor: Next/Previous File buttons that jump to the next file with search results, using the sort order as used in the results.
Editor: Search toolbar for searching through the open file.
File Formats: *.kmz extension is now part of the default file mask for the "zipped documents" archive format. A .kmz file is a compressed .kml file used by applications such as Google Earth.
File Formats: CHM (read only archive format).
File Formats: Office 2007 files (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.) can now be processed as text instead of as XML by turning on the IFilter option for "zipped documents" in the Archive Formats preferences.
File Formats: Option to use IFilter to convert files in proprietary formats to text using the same method as the search functionality built into Windows.
File Formats: Text in PowerPoint (*.ppt) slides can now be searched through by using the IFilter.
File Formats: Unicode characters in MS Word documents can now be read correctly by turning on the IFilter option for *.doc files.
File Formats: When a proprietary format is configured to be decoded, you can now choose whether a file that fails conversion should be skipped or should be searched as binary data.
File Selector: Copy or move the selected files, files with matches, or files without matches to a different folder or .zip archive.
File Selector: Delete files.
File Selector: Exclude files with search results.
File Selector: Hovering the mouse pointer over a file displays additional information such as the file's size and last modification date.
File Selector: Import File List to get a list of files from arbitrary text files to include or exclude those files from the action. The import command can be saved as part of the file selection so it will be repeated each time the action is executed.
File Selector: Limit the search to files with a file size in a certain range.
File Selector: Network can now be marked to search all network servers listed in the File Selector. If no network servers are listed at all, PowerGREP will scan the network when executing the action.
File Selector: Network servers can now be marked to search all (visible) shares on the server.
File Selector: Show Folders menu item and button to show only folders in the File Selector, to make it easier to work with folders containing very large numbers of files. If Search Archives is on, archives are shown too, as PowerGREP treats those as compressed folders.
Forum
Library: Store file selections and sequences.
Library: Store search terms without a complete action. These can be added and used via the black drop-down arrow next to the Search labels on the Action panel.
Placeholders: %MATCHCOUNT%: Number of occurrences of each match when grouping identical matches.
Placeholders: Basic arithmetic on numeric placeholders; e.g. %MATCHNZ:*2+10% numbers matches 10, 12, 14, 16, etc. Also works on placeholders like %MATCH% that normally hold text rather than numbers, but only when their text can be converted into a number.
Placeholders: Date and time. Right-click on the Search box on the Action panel and select Match Placeholders for a list.
Placeholders: File size. Right-click on the Search box on the Action panel and select Match Placeholders for a list.
Placeholders: Insert match placeholders by picking them from a list and easily set padding, case, and arithmetic options.
Placeholders: Number of the match counted separately for each search term when the search type is a list. %MATCHTERMN%, %MATCHFILETERMN%, and %MATCHSECTIONTERMN% count matches for the overall action, per file, and per section separately for each search term. They correspond with %MATCHN%, %MATCHFILEN%, and %MATCHSECTIONN% which count matches for all search terms combined.
Preferences, Action: Configure the folder PowerGREP uses for temporary files, instead of the system temp folder. Set this to use a drive that's faster than the drive Windows is installed on, or to make sure not to leave any traces on that drive.
Preferences, Action: Option to use a separate search thread for each disk drive so all disks are searched at the same time, even if the number of disks exceeds the number of CPU cores.
Preferences, Action: Option to use a separate search thread for each network server so all servers are searched at the same time, even if the number of servers exceeds the number of CPU cores.
Preferences, Action: Specify how many search threads to use, up to the number of CPU cores in the PC.
Preferences, Editor: Backup option not to create backups.
Preferences, Editor: Fully configurable backup setting, including destination folders, etc.
Preferences, Editor: Option to make the Next/Previous Match/File buttons on the Editor panel select the same match or file on the Results panel.
Preferences, External Editors: %LINESTOP% and %COLSTOP% command line placeholders that indicate the end of the match.
Preferences, External Editors: (...) buttons to browse for an executable and a working folder.
Preferences, External Editors: Option to show Open All Files command for an external editor if all files in the results match the extensions supported by the editor.
Preferences, File Selector: Separate masks for files and for folders to exclude them from all actions.
Preferences, General: Add or remove the "Search with PowerGREP" items in the right-click menu for folders in Windows Explorer.
Preferences, General: Send To menu item for PowerGREP, allowing both files and folders to be marked for searching.
Preferences, Results: Highlight matches produced by different search terms in different colors (dubbed fountain colors).
Preferences: Paragraph symbols have been replaced with line break indicators that indicate the type of line break (CRLF, LF, etc.). They are also affected by syntax highlighting now.
Preferences: Text layout choices for the action, results and file editors: complex (bidirectional editing using Uniscribe), left to right (like PowerGREP 3), forced monospaced, and forced monospaced ideographs. Allow a proportionally spaced font to be selected in any case.
Results/Editor: Back and forward mouse buttons now move to the previous or next match in the results.
Results: Align matches with context display option that displays matches with context, and indents each line so all the matches line up vertically. Use this option in combination with sorting matches alphabetically to get a concordance display. The matches will only line up correctly when turning of word wrap and using a monospaced layout for the results (configurable in the preferences).
Results: Bookmark files or matches in the results.
Results: Delete selected files or files that were found to have or not to have matches during the last PowerGREP action.
Results: Fold menu items to fold or unfold the results of one file or all files.
Results: Group search matches per unique match, then per unique file (i.e. get a list of files per search match).
Results: Include file in or Exclude file from the next action.
Results: Locate in File Selector command to select the file the cursor points at in the File Selector.
Results: Make and revert replacements directly on the Results pane, without using the editor.
Results: Next/Previous File buttons for quickly jumping between files in the results.
Results: Next/Previous Match buttons, just like in the Editor, can be made visible on the toolbar via the small arrow at the right hand edge on the toolbar.m
Results: Pause button to temporarily pause an action. The results (so far) of paused actions can be inspected. Paused actions can then be resumed or aborted.
Results: Search toolbar for searching through the text of the results.
Results: Second and following lines of multi-line matches and context are now lined up with the first line when showing context numbers.
Results: Sort files in order searched through. PowerGREP 3 searched files in alphabetical order, so there was no need for an option to show the files in the order searched through, as the A..Z option already covered that. PowerGREP 4 searches through multiple drives and files concurrently, which causes files to be added to the results in a non-deterministic order. If you sort files in the order they are searched through, new search results are always added to the top or bottom. If you sort files alphabetically, new search results are mixed with old results to maintain alphabetic order, just as it happens when sorting files by number of matches or by last modification date.
Results: Target file names only display option. Only available for rename, collect data, and search-and-replace actions. Displays a list of target files that were created.
Right-to-left language support.
Sequence: Perform any number and any kind of PowerGREP actions in sequence. Each action can be restricted to files that matched, or did not match, in one of the previous actions.
Text Encoding: EUC-JP, EUC-KR, EUC-CN, EUC-TW.
Text Encoding: ISO 2022.
View: Save custom layouts.
Improvements:
Action: Lists: Ctrl+Click on the Add button to add a duplicate of the selected search term, instead of adding a blank search term.
Action: When changing the search type to a list, start with a list with the current regular expression rather than an empty list.
Archives: ZIP archives containing files larger than 4 GB (64-bit ZIP files).
Clicking on a panel's tab or caption bar now activates the first or main control on that panel.
Command line parameters for target, backup, and results options can now be specified as strings instead of integers.
Editor: Closing a file without saving and then opening again now shows the file without the changes to highlighting made to the unsaved Make and Revert Replacement commands.
Editor: Make Replacement and Revert Replacement now immediately update the match on the Results display.
Editor: Make Replacement and Revert Replacement now make/revert all replacements inside the selected text if there is a selection, rather than just the one under the cursor.
Editor: Undoing and redoing Make and Revert Replacement now also updates the highlighting as the commands themselves do.
Editor: When the editor needs to close a file because it will be overwritten by the action, the prompt now shows Pause and Abort buttons to pause or abort the action, instead of the Cancel button (which aborted the action). Save and Don't Save buttons are still available.
File Formats: Google Adwords Editor *.aea and *.aes extensions are now part of the default file mask for the "zipped documents" archive format
File Formats: The *.epub extension is now part of the default file mask for the "zipped documents" archive format.
File Selector: If no files or folders are marked in the tree of files and folders, but some files or folders are selected, automatically mark those files when executing the action instead of complaining that no files are marked. The files and folders that were marked automatically are also unmarked automatically when the action completes. This way you can easily select some files to search through them without having to use the system of marking and unmarking files and folders.
File Selector: Long lists of file extensions are now processed almost as fast as a single extension, resulting in a noticeable speed increase when globbing tens of thousands of files against a dozen or more extensions. The file extensions applied to each file aren't just the Include Files and Exclude Files settings in the File Selector, but also the file masks used in the Encoding, File Formats, and Archive Formats preferences.
File Selector: Path box should not try to resolve network paths until both the server and share name have been typed in, and should not repeatedly try to resolve shares that can't be found. This prevents unnecessary delays, as Windows takes a long time to determine that a network share does not exist.
File Selector: Select multiple files at once, so they can all be marked with one button click.
File Selector: Support Unicode file names.
File Selector: The *folder\* file mask syntax for selecting all files in a particular folder now also works with archives.
Results/Editor: Highlight the active line even when the edit boxes don't have keyboard focus.
Results: Attempting to write the same target file twice in a single action that does not combine targets is now be treated as an error instead of overwriting the file.
Results: Display the number of unique matches in each file for quick collect actions that group identical matches.
Results: Dynamic limit of the maximum number of matches that can be displayed, based on actual memory usage, rather than a fixed limit of 100,000 matches. The memory limit can be configured in the Results Preferences.
Results: Opening results in an external editor should select context or a line if that's what was clicked on in the results, similar to what happens when double-clicking the results to open the editor.
Results: Print selection checkbox in the print preview is now enabled if you select part of the results before clicking the Print button.
Results: When collecting data from files in proprietary formats with the option to collect one results file for each file searched through, append a .txt extension to the target file name. E.g. save somefile.pdf.txt instead of somefile.pdf so the user doesn't end up with a plain text file with a .pdf extension.
Stop PowerGREP from locking up when something goes wrong with a particular file by killing off unresponsive worker threads after one minute, and list the file that the thread locked up on among the errors on the Results panel.

New in PowerGREP 3.5.5 (Sep 7, 2009)

New in PowerGREP 3.5.4 (Aug 26, 2009)

New in PowerGREP 3.5.3 (Aug 17, 2009)

New feature:
RegexMagic integration: Invoke RegexMagic on the Action panel to generate regular expressions.
Improvements:
Action: Alt+S now moves keyboard focus to the main search box, if it is already visible. (If not, press Ctrl+F3 first.)
Directory change notifications no longer cause PowerGREP to check whether directories still exist, which could degrade a PC's performance if an application touches very large numbers of files while you have several PowerGREP instances open.
Bug fixes:
Action: PowerGREP 3 failed to open PowerGREP Action files saved with PowerGREP 2 with an access violation error if the file did not specify a valid folder to search through.
Action: Searching for delimited literal text with thousands of items with the "whole words only" and/or "match whole section" options turned on was orders of magnitude slower than searching for the exact same items with those two options turned off.
Action: The "whole words only" setting was used for all search types even though it is only visible for literal text search types.
Action: Using a list of regular expressions for the "search and collect sections" file sectioning type with a "section collect" text that is not a single backreference caused an access violation during execution instead of a descriptive error preventing execution.
Action: Using path placeholders such as %FILE% and %PATH% for target files did not work with .zip archives.
File Selector: Pasting in a path to a file or folder that exists but is permanently excluded in the File Selector Preferences caused PowerGREP to crash with an access violation.
File Selector/Results: Right-clicking on a file and selecting Edit, Explore Folder showed an error message instead of exploring the folder if the folder had a comma in its name.
GREP: The "single *.~*" backup naming style did not work, causing PowerGREP not to update any files.
Regex: Regexes that consisted solely of lookbehind statements failed with an access violation error.
Results: Displaying the results of a "display search matches" action showing matches with context and sorted alphabetically with the option to show matches and replacements on separate lines, an extraneous line without the search match was shown after each line with a search match.

New in PowerGREP 3.5.2 (Mar 11, 2009)

New in PowerGREP 3.5.1 (Jan 5, 2009)

New in PowerGREP 3.5.0 (May 13, 2008)

Conversion manager: PowerGREP will now launch the conversion manager only when it's needed, rather than when starting PowerGREP.
File Formats: PowerGREP now sets the file date on files inside compound documents to the same date as the overall document file.
File Selector/Results: Keyboard mnemonics (underlined letters) for the default items in the Edit File submenu. You can assign mnemonics to your custom editors by placing an ampersand before the character you want to use as the mnemonic. E.g. "&My Editor" makes M the mnemonic.
Results, Export: When exporting to HTML, file references that are clickable in PowerGREP are now also clickable in the HTML output.
Results: Use base64Binary instead of hexBinary to save match data into .pgr files, resulting in a 33% size savings for match data.
Action: Searching for a list of thousands of search terms resulted in far greater memory usages than a search for a single regular expression that produces the same number of matches. Saving the results also resulted in excessively large .pgr files.
Action: Searching for delimited literal text with thousands of items is much slower than searching for the exact same items using the delimited regular expressions option.
Action: Selecting "Tab" as the delimiter between the search text and the replacement text caused PowerGREP to use the three letters "Tab" as the delimiter instead of a tab character.
Conversion manager: The conversion manager would stay in memory after the last PowerGREP instance was closed if PowerGREP had never searched through a file that needs conversion since it was first installed.
Editor, Print: Trying to print a file with highlighted matches caused an "invalid class typecast" error.
Editor: Opening a binary file while the editor was in text mode, or vice versa, caused an access violation error (3.4.2 only).
File Formats: PowerGREP did not always search through compound documents when the folder containing them was marked with "Include File or Folder" instead of "Include Folder and Subfolders". (PowerGREP did not automatically glob inside the compressed document if it was included by non-recursively marking its parent folder. If the document had been globbed previously, then it was searched.)
File Formats: Search-and-replace actions did not correctly treat compressed documents like Office 2007 and OpenOffice files as compound files to be copied and backed up as a whole. E.g. backup files were created for each file inside the DOCX file, and saved inside the DOCX, causing Office to report the file as corrupted. The whole DOCX file should be backed up instead.
File Formats: When doing a "find files" action without any search text and "search archives" turned on, PowerGREP would list all XML files inside Office 2007 and OpenOffice files rather than the DOCX or ODF file itself.
File Selector/Results: Right-clicking on a file inside a .zip archive now offers the option to explore the folder the .zip archive is in rather than the .zip archive itself (which doesn't work).
Results, Export: Exporting to HTML left the characters and & in place after the HTML entity if these characters occurred at the start of a match.
Results: PowerGREP did not correctly grep regular expressions that contained only literal text and one or more uFFFF code points above u007F.
Results: When the option to automatically fold files was turned on in the preferences, and files were being sorted by totals or file date, the results would flicker. Each time the results were updated, they would be briefly shown unfolded, and then folded.

New in PowerGREP 3.4.2 (Jan 21, 2008)

Action: Hexadecimal escapes like xFF in the replacement text to insert non-printable characters.
Action: Unicode escapes uFFFF and x{FFFF} in the replacement text to insert characters that cannot be typed on the keyboard.
Command Line: Search through files found in a previously saved search with /markresults previousresults.pgr. This parameter has the same effect as the Mark Files with Results command in the File Selector menu.
Regex: Forward references (i.e. a backreference to a group defined after it) are now supported. E.g. (2two|(one)) will match oneonetwo instead of triggering an error.
Setup: Create Portable Installation directly from the self-extracting setup. The Install on Removable Drive menu item in the Help menu was renamed for consistency.
File Selector/Results: Right-clicking on an .xml file inside a .docx file now shows the option to open the .docx file in Word 2007.
Results: When you group matches per unique match and double-click on a match to see in which files it was found, the Edit button will now be enabled an open the file the cursor points to in the match details instead of being disabled.
Action: %SECTIONN% was numbered starting from zero instead of one.
Action: Extra processing that reinserted the extra processing search match into the replacement (e.g. by using $0) sometimes caused PowerGREP to skip extra processing matches.
Action: If you turned on the "invert results" checkbox for a find files action without using file sectioning, Action|Save did not save the invert results option into the .pga file.
Action: Pressing F1 while the Comments edit box had keyboard focus caused PowerGREP to crash.
Action: Starting a search with the "search type" set to "delimited regular expressions" but the actual search terms being all literal text caused an access violation.
File Formats: Numbers in Excel spreadsheets will now be formatted like they are in Excel rather than always with 2 decimals and thousand separators.
File Formats: PowerGREP will no longer lock up if it fails to convert an Excel file.
File Selector: When using regular expressions for file masks, the comma in a quantifier like {1,3} was seen as a delimiter between file masks.
Files saved by PowerGREP 3.4.0 and 3.4.1 indicated version 3.3 instead of 3.4 of the XML schema. This did not cause any problems in PowerGREP 3.4.0 and 3.4.1, but prevented PowerGREP 3.3.x from detecting it was opening files saved with a newer version.
Path Placeholders: Paths with initial folders subtracted like %PATH-2% were not recognized as placeholders.
Results: File headers were not shown if the display type was "file names only" and the totals option was anything except to show the totals with the file header (3.4.x only).
Results: Loading a .pgr file that had search matches in a .zip or .jar file that no longer exists sometimes caused an access violation error.
Vista: The Edit submenu when right-clicking on a file did not show the default application associated with the file.

New in PowerGREP 3.4.1 (Jul 18, 2007)

Conversion Manager: If the file PowerGREP Conversion Cache.dat could not be found in the folder configured as PowerGREP's conversion cache, PowerGREP 3.4.0 would delete everything in that folder. PowerGREP 3.4.1 will leave the folder's contents alone.
Conversion Manager: The folder to use as the conversion cache was not properly initialized when running PowerGREP 3.4.0 for the first time, causing PowerGREP's installation folder to be used.
Conversion Manager: The combination of the above two conversion manager bugs caused PowerGREP to delete all files in its installation folder. Our apologies to anyone who lost data saved in PowerGREP's installation folder due to this unfortunate bug.
Conversion Manager: The conversion cache index was not properly read back when the conversion manager was started the next time, effectively causing the cache to be lost when all PowerGREP instances were closed. This bug also caused the conversion manager to use excessive amounts of memory in certain situations.
Conversion Manager: If the running cache size was set to zero, PowerGREP was unable to convert PDF files.
Core: Performing a search-and-replace using literal text (rather than binary data) through a binary file, caused the replacement to be inserted using two bytes per character instead of one byte (3.3.3 and 3.4.0 only).
Editor: Saving a file caused an access violation. This did not prevent the file from being saved, but did prevent the file and its backup from being added to the Undo History. (3.4.0 only).
Regex: ((?:abc) ) was optimized into (abc) which is not the same (the former captures all iterations; the latter only the last one) (3.4.0 only).
Regex: In free-spacing mode, PowerGREP did not allow whitespace between a quantifier and the ? or that follows it to make the quantifier lazy or possessive.
Regex: In free-spacing mode, PowerGREP did not properly handle space between a token and quantifiers using the curly braces syntax.
Regex: Octal escapes inside character classes caused an access violation.

PowerGREP Changelog

What's new in PowerGREP 5.3.5

New in PowerGREP 5.3.4 (Jan 9, 2024)

New in PowerGREP 5.3.3 (May 18, 2023)

New in PowerGREP 5.3.2 (Jul 8, 2022)

New in PowerGREP 5.3.1 (Sep 21, 2021)

New in PowerGREP 5.3.0 (Apr 7, 2021)

New in PowerGREP 5.2.3 (Sep 30, 2020)

New in PowerGREP 5.2.2 (Jun 24, 2020)

New in PowerGREP 5.2.1 (Feb 4, 2020)

New in PowerGREP 5.2.0 (Sep 6, 2019)

New in PowerGREP 5.1.7 (Nov 16, 2018)

New in PowerGREP 5.1.6 (Jun 27, 2018)

New in PowerGREP 5.1.5 (May 16, 2018)

New in PowerGREP 5.1.4 (Jan 30, 2018)

New in PowerGREP 5.1.3 (Nov 7, 2017)

New in PowerGREP 5.1.2 (May 31, 2017)

New in PowerGREP 5.1.1 (May 9, 2017)

New in PowerGREP 5.1.0 (Mar 28, 2017)

New in PowerGREP 5.0.6 (Jan 26, 2017)

New in PowerGREP 5.0.5 (Jan 6, 2017)

New in PowerGREP 5.0.4 (Dec 15, 2016)

New in PowerGREP 5.0.3 (Nov 24, 2016)

New in PowerGREP 5.0.2 (Oct 31, 2016)

New in PowerGREP 5.0.1 (Sep 23, 2016)

New in PowerGREP 5.0.0 (Sep 6, 2016)

New in PowerGREP 4.7.1 (Jun 14, 2016)

New in PowerGREP 4.7.0 (Sep 24, 2015)

New in PowerGREP 4.6.5 (May 4, 2015)

New in PowerGREP 4.6.4 (Jan 26, 2015)

New in PowerGREP 4.6.3 (Dec 17, 2014)

New in PowerGREP 4.6.2 (Sep 8, 2014)

New in PowerGREP 4.6.1 (Jun 9, 2014)

New in PowerGREP 4.6.0 (Nov 26, 2013)

New in PowerGREP 4.5.1 (Jun 7, 2013)

New in PowerGREP 4.5.0 (Mar 26, 2013)

New in PowerGREP 4.4.0 (Nov 1, 2012)

New in PowerGREP 4.3.3 (Apr 30, 2012)

New in PowerGREP 4.3.2 (Apr 6, 2012)

New in PowerGREP 4.3.1 (Feb 24, 2012)

New in PowerGREP 4.3.0 (Feb 16, 2012)

New in PowerGREP 4.2.4 (Oct 17, 2011)

New in PowerGREP 4.2.3 (Sep 26, 2011)

New in PowerGREP 4.2.2 (Jul 20, 2011)

New in PowerGREP 4.2.1 (Mar 1, 2011)

New in PowerGREP 4.2.0 (Jan 12, 2011)

New in PowerGREP 4.1.3 (Sep 24, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 4.1.2 (Aug 13, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 4.1.1 (Jul 8, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 4.1.0 (Jul 8, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 4.0.6 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 4.0.5 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 3.5.8 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 4.0.4 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 3.5.7 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 4.0.3 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 4.0.2 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 3.5.6 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 4.0.1 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 4.0.0 (Apr 10, 2010)

New in PowerGREP 3.5.5 (Sep 7, 2009)

New in PowerGREP 3.5.4 (Aug 26, 2009)

New in PowerGREP 3.5.3 (Aug 17, 2009)

New in PowerGREP 3.5.2 (Mar 11, 2009)

New in PowerGREP 3.5.1 (Jan 5, 2009)

New in PowerGREP 3.5.0 (May 13, 2008)

New in PowerGREP 3.4.2 (Jan 21, 2008)

New in PowerGREP 3.4.1 (Jul 18, 2007)

New in PowerGREP 3.3.0 (Aug 18, 2006)