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In e.g. the question Is there a Pattern Matching Utility like GREP in Windows?, one can find a few options for adding a grep utility to windows. But I am wondering why it's the case that there is no built-in grep-like function in Windows, as this seems to be a supremely useful thing (at least to a Linux user).

More specifically, is there a technical reason for this? E.g. does the difference in OS/filesystem architecture between Windows and Linux make it more difficult/slow/pointless/unsafe/etc. to have such functionality in Windows?

(I can imagine for example that an antivirus might not like for a program to read thousands of files in one go, and because of that microsoft perhaps decided to scrap a grep utility. That's of course pure speculation on my behalf, but it's the kind of answer I'm looking for)

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funklute
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    Your question is [off-topic](http://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic) with no direct impact on your code or someone-else's code. Consider using some more abstract and more chatty [Stack Exchange site](http://stackexchange.com/sites). BTW: In Windows users **did not need** such a tool as the user interface was graphical ([GUI](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface)) and programmers addressing the platform did not use primarily scripting languages. So Windows was a different platform than Linux, both from the perspective of user base and from the perspective of user's habits – xmojmr Nov 19 '14 at 11:32

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"Grep" is an unix tool - it was originally made for unix.

As far as the functionality goes, we have built-in "grep". Windows offers something similiar through commands find and findstr, which do quite a lot, and have been available for long time.

Plus, you can search file content through windows search.

Erti-Chris Eelmaa
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