the many functions of findstr

The June 6, 2016 tip of the night demonstrated how you can use the findstr Windows command to merge multiple text files. findstr can also be used to search through files - and there are a lot of options on how to run searches.

If you enter:

findstr /?

. . . at a command prompt you will see generated a description of how to structure a findstr search and a number of qualifiers that define the search.

I'm going to try to run different kinds of findstr searches on a folder containing some text files.

We begin with a text file, whitewhale.txt, at the root of a folder with the path C:\foofolder2

this folder has a subfolder with two files . . .

. . . one file with this content:

. . . and a second file with this content

when we enter the command:

findstr "moby" *.txt >C:\Process\results1.txt

. . . a text file is generated showing the line in the text file at the root of the home folder which includes the referenced string.

Including the reference /S in the command makes it search through subfolders in the home folder.

Using the reference in the command /R allows you to enter a regular expression search. Here we use the RegEx [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9] . . . to search for lines with four digit numbers .

If we enter in the reference /V the findstr command will return lines that don't contain the referenced string.

Ping test

A ping test measures the amount of time that it takes for packets to travel from a host computer to an internet destination and back. The time will be shown in milliseconds. [When data is transmitted on the internet it will be broken into different packets. Each packet has a header and payload. The header will have the sending and receiving IP addresses, and the protocol governing the format of the payload. The payload will have the actual content. Most packets are between 1KB and 1.5KB. Under TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) the maximum data size of a single packet is 64 KB. An alternative would be send a bitstream - individual bits of 1's and 0's from one source to a destination.]

You can run a ping test by going to start, entering cmd, and then typing in 'ping' followed by a web address.

The results will show how many packets were sent, how many were received back, and show the minimum, maximum, and average time for each packet to make the round trip.

You may receive a 'Request Timed Out' message if a network's firewall is set up to block ping tests. The ping test is a latency test - it shows how long it takes for data to go from one location to another - this is different than bandwidth which measures the maximum amount of data that can go through a connection at a given period of time.

recimg in command prompt

Entering recimg on the command line will allow you create an image of the current state of a Windows PC. It substitutes the standard Windows recovery image.