Take the 2-minute tour ×

Looking for a lean windows application that will let me search through very large log files efficiently for specific error keywords, ideally with the ability to filter such keywords.

share|improve this question

closed as off topic by Zoredache, rnxrx, Ward, Michael Hampton, Brent Pabst Sep 10 '12 at 12:54


Welcome to ServerFault. As a general rule we do not provide answers to shopping questions per the FAQ. Please take a few seconds to check it out. –  Brent Pabst Sep 10 '12 at 12:55
add comment

3 Answers

Assuming we're talking about text files, try (win)grep.
You will need to learn some basic regular expressions to do anything really useful, but simple keyword searches should be easy right out of the box.

share|improve this answer
Note that WinGrep is shareware -- there are also free (as in beer) versions of grep available for Windows if you google around, but this guy actually took the time to hack up a pretty decent GUI - I think he's earned his price. –  voretaq7 Sep 7 '12 at 20:50
add comment

Can you quantify "very large"? And when you say "filter", do mean to only return certain things, or to exclude certain things?

Windows findstr.exe copes with large files, but may be too limited for your needs (depending on the answers above).

If you've got any scripting experience, Perl is a very good tool for text scanning / replacement. It's damn quick too (I use ActiveState Perl).

Ditto the wingrep suggestion above.

Finally, if you want to use a GUI app, have a nose at Textpad and Wildedit from www.textpad.com. Textpad's "Find in files" feature is brilliant, but it may have a file size limit.

share|improve this answer
add comment

I've used Vim in the past with very large (2+ GB) text files, you can find it here: http://www.vim.org/index.php

share|improve this answer
add comment
