ngrep
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ngrep is a command line utility that searches for text in files. It was written in C# under the .NET 1.1 Framework. For many years I used the Turbo GREP 3.0 utility that was supplied with the Borland C++ 5.0 development kit. This old utility worked well for many years, but under Windows XP it stopped reporting long file files and I found the number of options inadequate.

In early 2003 I noticed that the .NET Framework namespace System.Text.RegularExpressions had built-in classes that supported the full implementation of full regular expression matching. Since most of the hard work was already done by the Framework, I simply wrote a command line utility in C# with plenty of behaviour switches to wrap around the pattern matching.

Here is the help display from ngrep when no parameters are entered:

FUNCTION:
  A command line grep (Version 1.6.1789.23534).
SYNTAX:  ngrep filemask expr1 [expr2 expr3 ...]  [-switches]
  expr(s) ...... Regular expression.
  filemask ..... File mask to scan.
  -i ........... Ignore cases.
  -c ........... Count matches.
  -d ........... Recurse directories.
  -v ........... Verbose mode.
  -n ........... Display line numbers.
  -s ........... Short line display.
  -f ........... No file name display.
  -F ........... File name separator lines.
  -x ........... List lines not containing.
  -eEEE ........ EEE = utf7/utf8/ascii/unicode.
  -zSSS ........ Skip file names containing 'SSS'.
  -mnnn ........ Search a maximum of nnn lines (stop after nnn lines).

I won't bother explaining all of the parameters in detail to other developers, but you should see that the switches provide these features:

• Optional searching through subdirectories.
• Multiple patterns can be searched for.
• File names with matches can be display in two different formats or suppressed.
• Very long matching lines can be truncated for easier display.
• Character encoding can optionally be specified.
• File names containing a certain string can optionally be skipped.

A description of the regular expression syntax can be found at MSDN Introduction To Regular Expressions.

	ngrep Project - (11KB) ZIP of the Visual Studio .NET 2005 Project with source code
	ngrep Executable - (13KB) ZIP of the EXE file only

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