[ACCEPTED]-Free alternative(s) to PowerGREP-utility

I would suggest trying the new dnGrep, it's a .NET 3 application that provides grep-like functionality 2 and has almost all the features you specified.

Here 1 are the features and a sample screenshot:

• Shell integration (ability to search from explorer)
• Plain text/regex/XPath search (including case-insensitive search)
• Phonetic search (using Bitap and Needleman-Wunch algorithms)
• File move/copy/delete actions
• Search inside archives (via plug-in)
• Search MS Word documents (via plug-in)
• Search PDF documents (via plug-in)
• Undo functionality
• Optional integration with text editor (like notepad++)
• Bookmarks (ability to save regex searches for the future)
• Pattern test form
• Search result highlighting
• Search result preview
• Does not require installation (can be run from USB drive)

Feature-wise nothing even comes close to 25 PowerGREP, so the question is, how many 24 compromises are you willing to make? I agree 23 that PowerGREP's price tag is a bit steep 22 (not that I have ever regretted a single 21 penny I spent on it), so perhaps something 20 cheaper might do?

UltraEdit is an excellent text editor 19 with very good regex support. It supports 18 Perl-style regular expressions, and you 17 can do find/replace operations in multiple 16 (optionally pre-filtered) files with it. I'd 15 say it can do everything you want to do 14 according to your question.

RegexBuddy, apart from 13 being the best regex editor/debugger on 12 the market, also has a limited GREP functionality, allowing 11 search/replace in (pre-filtered) subdirectories. It's 10 also not free, but considerably less expensive 9 than PowerGREP, and its regex engine has 8 all the features you could ask for (the 7 current version even introduced recursive 6 regexes, and the extremely useful ability 5 to translate regexes between flavors). Big 4 pluses here are the ability to do a non-desctructive 3 preview for all operations, and to have 2 backups automatically be created of all 1 files that are modified during a grep.

I use GrepWin extensively during development and 3 on production servers - it doesn't support 2 all the features you specify but it gets 1 the job done. (YMMV)

For a fast loading, fast executing program 3 used to only FIND (no search and replace) then 2 I've found Baregrep to be pretty good. It 1 does subdirs.

http://www.baremetalsoft.com/baregrep/

You might have a look on this:

http://alternativeto.net/software/powergrep/?license=opensource

Currently 1 there're 6 alternatives to powergrep.

I do not know Powergrep but grepwin lets 1 you search regexes in directories.

http://tools.tortoisesvn.net/grepWin

Get Cygwin for a bunch of free alternatives!
grep, sed, awk, perl, python... goes 10 on.
But, oops! you want to stick to GUI.

I 9 always wonder at how people wrap GUI around 8 things like grep and get cash for that!

WinGrep seems 7 to be free though and, yet comes with quite 6 a punch.

Windows Grep is designed for searching 5 plain-ASCII text files, such as program 4 source, HTML, RTF and batch files, but it 3 can also search binary files such as word 2 processor documents, databases, spreadsheets 1 and executables.

you can get GNU grep or Gawk

0

Have a look at EasyGrep - https://easygrep.com

Like a super light 1 version of PowerGrep, works well.