PowerGREP offers you a wealth of features that will come in handy in many situations when you want to find information, update or convert files, or extract useful information and statistics. PowerGREP is a knowledge worker’s Swiss army knife.
Quickly search across files, folders and archives on your computer or network. Search for words, phrases or binary data. Or use regular expressions to describe the form of what you’re looking for, and let PowerGREP find the actual text. Specify as many search terms as you want. Inspect the context of individual search matches, or group identical matches together.
Search and replace through heaps of files without opening them first. Preview the replacements without modifying any files. Make complex replacements or conversions with regular expressions. Replace or revert individual search matches at your leisure. Work safely with flexible backup and undo options.
Gather statistics and extract data from files, archives and logs. Collect search matches into one or more new files. Use regular expressions to describe the form of the text you want to extract, and let PowerGREP collect all or part of the match. Sort matches, and group identical matches and count them, to produce informative statistics.
Split huge files into smaller files. Merge many small files into fewer larger files. Rearrange logs and data sets to make them easier to work with.
Rename, copy, and move files and folders by searching and replacing through file and folder names or paths. Compress and decompress files by moving them in and out of archives.
PowerGREP has a wide range of capabilities you won’t find in any other Windows grep tool. While you will use some of these features only occasionally, they will surely save you a lot of time and tedious manual editing on many occasions.
Apply any number of search terms of regular expressions sequentially or concurrently. Complex search and replace operations often require multiple steps. Use PowerGREP to execute as many steps as you want in a single operation. Run the steps concurrently (search matches won’t overlap), or sequentially (replacements cascade onto the following steps). Save all steps into a single PowerGREP Action for instant reuse.
Similarly, while searching or collecting data, use a list of search terms or regular expressions to find files matching different criteria, or to extract disparate information from each file.
Limit your search to specific file sections. When updating web sites, limit the search and replace to HTML tags, or even specific HTML tags, or alternatively, skip HTML tags. When programming, search through only comments and/or strings, or alternatively, skip comments and/or strings. Use as many regular expressions as you want to section files.
Split files into records before searching. Instead of searching whole files at once, or line by line, split files into whichever record or block structure the files are formatted with. Specify record delimiters, or use regular expressions to match the records themselves.
When sectioning files or splitting them into records, you can work with the sections as a whole. Require search matches to span complete sections, collect or replace whole records, or return those records in which the search terms cannot be found.
Post-process replacement text or text to be collected. Often, a search match isn’t in the format you want it to be. PowerGREP’s unique “extra processing” feature allows you to perform additional search and replace steps on each search match. E.g. when processing web logs, replace URL-encoded characters when extracting search engine keywords from referrer URLs.
Stay safe with the permanent Undo History. When PowerGREP overwrites a file, it will create a backup copy of the original using your preferred naming style, placing the backup in your preferred location. If you change your mind about a particular action, undo it with just one click in PowerGREP’s Undo History. Even after you’ve closed PowerGREP or rebooted your computer. Or, with another click, delete all backup files when they’re no longer needed.
Perform audits and forensic analysis without leaving a trace on the computer you run PowerGREP on. Create a portable installation of PowerGREP onto a USB stick or any other removable device. You can use that portable installation on any PC. PowerGREP will automatically use the USB stick to save its settings, without touching the host computer, unless you explicitly tell PowerGREP to modify or delete certain files.
The original grep was a pure command line tool. Modern Windows applications often only provide a point-and-click interface. PowerGREP provides the best of both worlds. All of its features can be used through both its rich graphical user interface (GUI) as well as via the command line. The GUI makes PowerGREP easy-to-use, while the command line allows you to automate or schedule anything.
PowerGREP is compatible with a wide range of software in various ways. Use industry standard regular expressions to specify text patterns, compatible with Perl, Java, .NET and many other applications and programming languages. Use the skills you already have with PowerGREP, or use your new-found skills in many situations.
Where most Windows grep tools support only Windows text files, and probably Unicode, PowerGREP supports a wide range of both current and legacy text file encodings: all Windows code pages, various Unicode transformations, all ISO-8859 character sets, most MS-DOS and PC DOS code pages, ECBDIC IBM mainframe code pages, KOI8, etc. Search through, edit and create text files in any of these encodings. Configure PowerGREP to use specific encodings for certain file types.
PowerGREP can also decode a variety of popular proprietary file formats: Microsoft Word documents (.doc and .dot files), Adobe Acrobat documents (.pdf files), Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (.xls files), Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets (.wks and .wk1 files) and Quattro Pro spreadsheets (.wq1, .wq2 and .wkq files). Search through these files as if they were plain text files, even if you don’t have the original software that created those files.
PowerGREP supports the Office Open XML and OpenDocument formats used by Microsoft Office 2007 (and later) and OpenOffice. This includes Word 2007 documents (.docx files), Excel 2007 spreadsheets (.xlsx files), PowerPoint 2007 presentations (.pptx files), and all files saved by the OpenOffice and LibreOffice suites (.odf and other files).
There are four ways to see PowerGREP in action: