DOS has a few commands like find, findstr and sort which can be used to manipulate text. ($ help <cmd> shows the usage help for all these commands.) However, their usage is very different from those that a Unix user may be familiar with.
One of the best things about Cygwin is that these commands useful for “quick and dirty” work on large chunks of text data are easy to learn, are consistent across all Unix-based OSs, have a number of options, and are quite extensive. When used in combination, they can save a lot of programming.
($ <command> <option> <inputs> is …read more

find is an elaborate search program with a number of features. Unlike the Google Desktop Search and locate, it doesn’t index anything but processes the request on the fly. Thus it is slower.
find is one of the most useful commands when you also have to search within unknown files and make further operations on the result set. It does a recursive search, looking in all subdirectories.
The first set of arguments is always the paths where the search should initiate. $ find /home /tmp <remaining arguments> would search based on the remaining arguments in /home, /tmp and all their subdirectories. If …read more