Using PGrep

I often use grep in Windows and Linux to find text in files. I have noticed that grep only works on traditional text files with .txt, .c, .cpp, .list, etc extensions. It doesn’t work with Markdown and C# text files and I find this frustrating.

I have found a parallel grep program in the Microsoft Learn code samples written by David Pine that overcomes the grep limitations.

The thing that I really like about this program is that I can use regular expressions in the search text.

I have made some minor modifications to the command line arguments in this code.

Arguments

• -s search sub directories.
• -i ignore case.
• -n remove the file and line numbers from the display.

Usage

A simple example.

    pgrep -si "main" *.cs

.\RecordDBToJSON\ExtractData.cs:23 public static int Main(string[] args)

Using regular expressions.

    pgrep "(#\s|##\s|###\s)" Working*.md

Returns.

.\working-with-data-and apis.md:1 # Working With Data and API's in JavaScript
.\working-with-data-and apis.md:3 ## The fetch() function
.\working-with-data-and apis.md:68 ## URL.createObjectURL()
...

I can modify this to create a simple table of contents list for any Markdown file.

    pgrep -n "(#\s|##\s|###\s)" Working*.md

Returns.

# Working With Data and API's in JavaScript
## The fetch() function
## URL.createObjectURL()
## Handling errors
## async /await
### Extra challenges
...

I will be using pgrep extensively from now on.

Added notes

I found that I can’t pipe this command into a text file which is something I would do to keep the results of my search.

  pgrep ([Dd]ylan) *.txt > BobDylan.txt

Returns this message.

The process cannot access the file ‘C:\folder\BobDylan.txt’ because it is being used by another process.

I can get around this issue with the following command.

  pgrep ([Dd]ylan) *.txt > BobDylan.lst