You can use the ‘type’ and ‘find’ command in Dos/Windows to get the equivalent output of the UNIX ‘cat’ and ‘grep’ commands. The ‘find’ command can be very useful when you are trying to search for a specific text or phrase over multiple files. The ‘find’ command also comes in handy when searching for all the occurrences of a specific text or phrase in all the files under all the sub-directories of a given directory.

The Type Command

The ‘type’ command in Dos simply displays the contents of a text file or files. To see the content of a file simply enter the following in the command prompt:
C:>type “filename”

The Find Command

The ‘find’ command in Dos can be used to search for a text string in a file or files. below is the usage and optional parameters of the ‘find’ command.

FIND [/V] [/C] [/N] [/I] [/OFF[LINE]] "string" [[drive:][path]filename[ ...]]

/V         Displays all lines NOT containing the specified string.
/C         Displays only the count of lines containing the string.
/N         Displays line numbers with the displayed lines.
/I         Ignores the case of characters when searching for the string.
/OFF[LINE] Do not skip files with offline attribute set.
"string"   Specifies the text string to find.
[drive:][path]filename
Specifies a file or files to search.

If a path is not specified, FIND searches the text typed at the prompt or piped from another command.


Find Command Usage Examples

To find any text occurrence in all the files within a directory simply enter the following at the command prompt.

C:>find “text to find” *


D:\Project Material\find command example>find "text-align" *

---------- ADSENSE INSERTION TAG.TXT
<p style="text-align: center;"><!-- wp_ad_camp_1 --></p>
---------- CFORMS.PHP
echo '<p style="text-align: left;"><label for="cforms-title'.$no.'">';
---------- ROBOTS.TXT
---------- ROBOTS_LANGUAGE_FILTER.TXT
---------- TRANSLATION_PAGE.TXT


Use the ‘/n’ parameter to print out the line numbers.


D:\Project Material\find command example>find /n "text-align" *

---------- ADSENSE INSERTION TAG.TXT
[1]<p style="text-align: center;"><!-- wp_ad_camp_1 --></p>
[2]text-align
[3]Test line with the text text-align
[6]Another line with the desired text text-align

---------- CFORMS.PHP
[2269]          echo '<p style="text-align: left;"><label for="cforms-title'.$no.'">';

---------- ROBOTS.TXT


You can use ‘type’ and then pipe the output to the ‘find’ command:

D:\Project Material\find command example>type robots.txt | find /n "Disallow: /iw/"
[37]Disallow: /iw/


You can get really creative with these commands.

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