Hackszine.com: FART: easy grep-like utility for Windows

FART: easy grep-like utility for Windows

The Find And Replace Text utility is a handy little command-line tool to have if you're a Windows user. It can function as a simple grep-like utility for quickly searching through whole directories of files, and you can also use it to perform mass search and replace operations on a file or group of files.

The command format is fart <options> filename search <replace>. Basic options are -r (recursive), -c (print filename and match count), -i (ignore case), -n (print matched line numbers), --c-style (interpret backslashes as c-style characters).

For example, let's say a Linux buddy of yours sent you a bunch of html files and they have unix line endings that are barfing in notepad. One simple command fixes the problem, replacing all the newlines with a full PC carriage return, line feed combo:

fart --c-style *.html \n \r\n

Or perhaps you need to quickly track down some work that is left to be done throughout a big project directory. You can use fart to recursively search a directory and spit out all the file names and line numbers containing the text "TODO":

fart -nr * TODO

It's easy to see how you could shoot yourself in the foot with this one. Make sure to fart with caution and back up your files before doing a big search and replace.

FART @ SourceForge - Link

Posted by Jason Striegel | Feb 7, 2008 09:55 PM
Lifehacker, Windows | Permalink | Comments (5)

Comments

Newest comments listed first.

Posted by: Mihai Criveti on February 8, 2008 at 9:18 AM

Try "findstr", it does Regular Expressions. Part of Windows too :-).

C:\Windows\System32\findstr.exe -?
[..]

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

Posted by: Andy Lester on February 9, 2008 at 8:37 AM

ack is also a good choice for Windows. It's pure Perl, uses Perl regular expressions, and is well-supported.

http://petdance.com/ack/

Posted by: How does this compare to mtr? on February 11, 2008 at 10:21 AM

How does this program differ from MiniTrue? http://www.student.northpark.edu/pemente/sed/minitrue.htm

Posted by: Mahmudul Hasan on February 11, 2008 at 7:25 PM

Fart is cool.

Findstr is a powerfull tool i know. But fart is very handy for certain jobs, for which findstr will take a lengthier command.

Mahmudul Hasan

Posted by: TomasV on March 7, 2008 at 2:45 PM

This looks like a nice tool, but a RegEx search and REPLACE command-line utility would be nice (which the above mentioned aren't). Is there even any (for Windows)? It's planned for FART based on the info on th SF.net page.