What is a good bulk find / replace tool for windows?

Question

I'm looking to find / replace in alot of files and was wondering if anybody could recommend some good tools for Windows. I'd prefer them to be free.

Thanks

Answer 1

This is what I use:

for GUI grepWin: link text

for superfast commandline: gsar.exe from link text

Answer 2

Install Cygwin, its free and gives a linux-like scriptable environment in Windows.
Do lookup the manual pages for commands I describe here (man find for example).

List files in a directory (folder) with,

find . -type f  
## Note: you can also select files here (see the man page)

Use that to search in multiple files like this,

grep -Hn pattern $(find . -type f)

Use it to replace across files like this.
Create a script file (say) replace-in-files.sh.
Write the following in the file,

#!/bin/sh
# Sample script: replace-in-files.sh
for f in $(<find . -type f);
do
    sed 's/pattern/replacement/g' $f > tmpFile.txt
    mv tmpFile.txt $f;
done;
rm -f tmpFile.txt

Here,
tmpFile.txt should be some temporary name (not already existing in the directory).
And, pattern is the regex you want to change with replacement.
Execute chmod a+x replace-in-files.sh and the file becomes an executable that you can fire from a Cygwin terminal with ./replace-in-files.sh

You can build up for there for many other requirements.
To lookup manual pages for commands like sed, find, grep you can also google "manual sed" etc.

The Advanced Bash Scripting guide at the Linux Documentation Project site is a good reference and most of the concepts work under Cygwin. Also has Awk, sed, briefs at the end.

Answer 3

Whilst probably not as fast as the above options - Notepad++ has a good find/replace with RegEx support.

Answer 4

I would go with Cygwin. If this is not desirable, on http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ you can find a bunch of standalone GNU utilities like sed, grep and find ported to Windows.

Answer 5

I've been using Text WorkBench for a while now and think it's fantastic. It's got lots of useful features including batch replace plans, regular expressions, include/exclude file extensions, editing files inside the application, etc.

Not free though... Think it costs about $40, but is easily worth it given the amount of time it saves. I'm not affiliated with the company in anyway, just a happy customer.