grepping in windows

is there some sort of easy way (i.e. not installing cygwin) to get grep like functionality in windows? all i want is something that does grep -i something blah.txt. normal searching is not good because it takes far too long

As far as I know, you will need to install something. My suggestion:
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
^ dl and unzip that somewhere; click on 'my computer'->system-enviromental variables and add $INSTALLPATH\bin:$INSTALLPATH;usr\local\wbin to your path (eg, if you unzipped it to d:\winnix, you'd add "d:\winnix\bin;d:\winnix\usr\local\wbin").

That will give you grep (and unrar, and zsh), and it only takes up a little bit of space.

>>1
>>2's option is probably the simplest. Do that, or just Google for coreutils/textutils/etc for Windows, or grep for Windows.

Two other options would be to use Cygwin or Microsoft Windows Services for Unix (commercial), which I suppose you don't want.

Finally, you can always (and should always) have something to play in your Windows, like Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc. Here's a simple grep -i in Perl for example:

$re = shift(@ARGV);
while (<>) {
    print if /$re/i;
}

http://gnuwin32.sf.net/

Warning: Not for unxutils newbies, these programs contain installers that set paths up, they are also up to date.

well, if you copy cygwin1.dll and grep.exe to your system32 directory you ought to be able to invoke it from cmd.exe with no installation.

>>5
That too

install freebsd

>>7
FreeBSD does not use the GPL license, it's antichrist software

>>8
FreeBSD uses a freer license than GPL, so STFU.

bsd licence is free as in not closed yet.

>>10
What? Once it's been released under BSD/MIT or into the public domain, nobody can reverse that. Anybody can start a closed branch, but there will still be the open version.