Tell HN: Windows' find.exe claims that it's “Find String (grep) Utility”

9 points·zinekeller··6 comments

... when it's absolutely not even capable of regex matching, which is required under POSIX (and implemented by both the BSD and GNU grep).

View on HN

Find was first added to DOS 38 years ago, years before POSIX was created, and even more years before grep was added to POSIX. Find's capabilities were kept as is for compatibility, newer, more capable, utilities have been added over the years like findstr and select-string.

The modern Windows equivalent (for over a decade now) to grep is the Select-String command in PowerShell. It supports RegEx fully. In PS, grep is actually aliased to it.

https://adamtheautomator.com/powershell-grep/

I switched to using RipGrep at https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

It's native, really really fast, supports regex, and has nice defaults. The only catch is you need to understand its default ignores if you're working in a git repo.

Windows claims to be POSIX.1 (IEEE Std 1003.1-1990 / ISO/IEC 9945-1:1990) compliant which doesn't cover command line utilities. You might be thinking of POSIX.2: Shell and Utilities (IEEE Std 1003.2-1992), which does cover functions of standard utilities and the shell.

You probably already know that, but you should use WSL(2) or Git Bash to not lose your mind.

Get the developer’s SDK for Git Bash and then you can use pacman like it’s an arch box

Reply on news.ycombinator.com