• All findstr command-line options must precede Strings and FileName in the command string.
  
  
• Regular expressions use both literal characters and metacharacters to find patterns of text, rather than exact strings of characters. A literal character is a character that does not have a special meaning in the regular-expression syntax—it matches an occurrence of that character. For example, letters and numbers are literal characters. A metacharacter is a symbol with special meaning (an operator or delimiter) in the regular-expression syntax.
  
  The following table lists the metacharacters that findstr accepts.
  
  

   

  Metacharacter	Value
  .	Wildcard: any character
  *	Repeat: zero or more occurrences of the previous character or class
  ^	Line position: beginning of the line
  $	Line position: end of the line
  [class]	Character class: any one character in a set
  [^class]	Inverse class: any one character not in a set
  [x-y]	Range: any characters within the specified range
  \x	Escape: literal use of a metacharacter x
  \<string	Word position: beginning of the word
  string\>	Word position: end of the word

  The special characters in regular expression syntax have the most power when you use them together. For example, use the following combination of the wildcard character (.) and repeat (*) character to match any string of characters:
  
  
  .*

  Use the following expression as part of a larger expression to match any string beginning with "b" and ending with "ing":
  
  
  b.*ing

Use spaces to separate multiple search strings unless the argument is prefixed with /c.

To search for "hello" or "there" in file x.y, type:

findstr "hello there" x.y 

To search for "hello there" in file x.y, type:

findstr /c:"hello there" x.y 

To find all occurrences of the word "Windows" (with an initial capital letter W) in the file Proposal.txt, type:

findstr Windows proposal.txt 

To search every file in the current directory and all subdirectories that contained the word Windows, regardless of the letter case, type:

findstr /s /i Windows *.* 

To find all occurrences of lines that begin with "FOR" and are preceded by zero or more spaces (as in a computer program loop), and to display the line number where each occurrence is found, type:

findstr /b /n /r /c:"^ *FOR" *.bas 

To search for multiple strings in a set of files, create a text file that contains each search criterion on a separate line. You can also list the exact files that you want to search in a text file. For example, to use the search criteria in the file Stringlist.txt, search the files listed in Filelist.txt, and then store the results in the file Results.out, type:

findstr /g:stringlist.txt /f:filelist.txt > results.out 

To list every file containing the word "computer" within the current directory and all subdirectories, regardless of case, type:

findstr /s /i /m "\<computer\>" *.*

To list every file containing the word "computer" and any other words that begin with "comp", (such as "compliment" and "compete"), type:

findstr /s /i /m "\<comp.*" *.*