Searches for a string in files or input, outputting matching lines. Unlike FINDSTR, it cannot search folders recursively, cannot search for a regular expression, requires quotation marks around the sought string, and treats space literally rather than as a logical or.

Examples:

• find "(object" *.txt

• dir /S /B | find "receipt"

• dir /S /B | find /I /V "receipt"

  Prints all non-matching lines in the output of the dir command, ignoring letter case.

• find /C "inlined" *.h

  Instead of outputting the matching lines, outputs their count. If more than one file is searched, outputs one count number per file preceded with a series of dashes followed by the file name; does not output the total number of matching lines in all files.

• find /C /V "" < file.txt

  Outputs the number of lines AKA line count in file.txt. Does the job of wc -l of other operating systems. Works by treating "" as a string not found on the lines. The use of redirection prevents the file name from being output before the number of lines.

• type file.txt | find /C /V ""

  Like the above, with a different syntax.

• type *.txt 2>NUL | find /C /V ""

  Outputs the sum of line counts of the files ending in .txt in the current folder. The 2>NUL is a redirection of standard error that removes the names of files followed by empty lines from the output.

• find "Schönheit" *.txt

  If run from a batch file saved in unicode UTF-8 encoding, searches for the search term "Schönheit" in UTF-8 encoded *.txt files. For this to work, the batch file must not contain the byte order mark written by Notepad when saving in UTF-8. Notepad++ is an example of a program that lets you write UTF-8 encoded plain text files without byte order mark. While this works with find command, it does not work with FINDSTR.

• find "Copyright" C:\\Windows\\system32\\a*.exe

  Works with binary files no less than text files.

Links:

• find at ss64.com
• find at Microsoft

$ find /?
Searches for a text string in a file or files.

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.