Grep and CMD escaping

Question

I am trying to grep this pattern: ^#include\s+"[^"]+"

Unfortunately, when I try the following in a Windows batch file, the pipe (|) and the sort are treated as inputs to grep, probably because of the unbalanced quotes.

> grep -P '^#include\s+"[^"]+"' --include=*.h --include=*.cpp | sort

grep: |: No such file or directory
grep: sort: No such file or directory

I tried different combinations of escaping, both with backslash and with caret, but could not get it to work.

Edit:

By trial and error, I got this to work: grep -P '^^#include\s+\"[^\"]+\^"' --include=*.h --include=*.cpp | sort

It is a weird mix of CMD escapes (^) and regex escapes (\), without an apparent rhyme or reason to which one needs to be used where.

I am leaving the question open in the hope that someone will offer a general explanation.

Answer 1

PowerShell has regex support. If you are on a supported Windows system, PowerShell was installed with it.

=== Do-Grepit.ps1

Get-ChildItem -Path '*.h','*.cpp' |
    ForEach-Object { Select-String -Pattern '^#include\s+"[^"]+"' -Path $_ }

At an interactive console, using aliases could make for less typing, but aliases should not be coded into script files.

gci -pa *.h,*.cpp|%{sls '^#include\s+"[^"]+"' $_}

If you are desperate to run this from a cmd batch-file, then you could:

powershell -NoLogo -NoProfile -File "Do-Grepit.ps1"