PowerGREP Version History

Don’t let the long lists of issues on this page make you think our products have a lot of problems. Quite to the contrary. All the bugs listed below are bugs that we have fixed. Many of these are corner cases reported by only one or perhaps a handful of our customers. Other software companies often don’t spend any effort addressing such issues, much less list them publicly. We take pride in producing high quality software, and often release free updates to ensure you won’t have any problems with our software.

Your purchase also comes with one year of free major upgrades. So don’t worry if there might be a new major upgrade around the corner just because it’s been a while since the last major upgrade. If there is one around the corner, you’ll get it free, without having to ask. (But you can keep the old version if you prefer.)

If you ever hit a snag with PowerGREP, check here whether you have the latest version. If you do, simply report the issue on the forum and we’ll help you out as soon as we can.

PowerGREP 5.3.5 – 18 January 2024

Bug fixes:

Sequences failed with an access violation during or after the first step (5.3.4 only).

PowerGREP 5.3.4 – 9 January 2024

Bug fixes:

Action: Between collected text now offers only 3 options (nothing; line break; custom) when the action type is “list files”, “file or folder name search”, or “file or folder name collect” as these actions never collect more than one piece of text per file (the file name, file path, or text to be collected for the first match).
Action: Match placeholders and path placeholders were treated as literal text when used in the target file header and target file footer for a “list files”, “file or folder name search”, or “file or folder name collect” action.
Action: Match placeholders such as %ACTIONDATE% were replaced with nothing when used in the target file header and target file footer for a “search” or “collect data” action.
Editor: Attempting to directly open a file using a compound document format now shows a message that the editor can only open files within the compound document in this mode.
Editor: Highlight matches when the Results panel is showing matches found by directly searching the Editor panel.
File Format Configuration: If the only change to a conversion format was the encoding used by the external converter then that change wasn’t applied to the action.
Import File Listing: Custom regex to split file option never found more than 2 paths in each file.
Import File Listing: Relative paths option did not work when the base folder was the root of a drive.
Regex: Subroutine calls to capturing groups defined inside lookbehind are now a syntax error; previously such calls were incorrectly matched from right to left, possibly causing the regex engine to get stuck in an infinite loop.
Right-clicking certain files that have a context menu handler in a common file dialog box (used by the various Open and Save As buttons) could crash PowerGREP; this did not affect any of PowerGREP’s own file types.

PowerGREP 5.3.3 – 18 May 2023

Improvements:

Action: Convert matched files to text no longer rewrites files that already use the desired encoding and do not need to have any line breaks changed or a BOM added or removed.
Editor|New now toggles the editor to hexadecimal mode if the default encoding specified in the text encoding configuration selected on the File Selector panel is “binary file”; it toggles the editor to text mode if the default encoding is anything else.
File Formats: PDF files that are password-protected are now skipped with an error message saying the PDF is password-protected rather than a generic “PDF conversion error”.
File Selector: Dollar signs are now allowed in server names in UNC paths so that paths like \\wsl$\Ubuntu\ are recognized as valid UNC paths.
File Selector: Predefined configurations for hiding files and folders that contain versioning control data how hide the folders .git (Git), .hg (Mercurial), and .bzr (Bazaar) in addition to .svn (Subversion) and “Sync Issues” (Outlook).
Forum: Conversation and message lists now use the plain text color configured on the Syntax Colors section in the Preferences for consistency with the editor control for the body text of forum messages.

Bug fixes:

Action: A “collect data” action with “search type” set to “regular expression” with a regex that consists entirely of literal text and with a backreference to the entire regex match in the Collect box caused the action to crash.
Action: A search-and-replace failed to start with an access violation error if file sectioning was used with “invert search results” and the search type of the main part of the action was “regular expression” or “free-spacing regular expression” and the search term consists entirely of literal text.
Action: Convert matched files to text overwrote files in proprietary formats with the plain text conversion instead of creating a copy of the file with a .txt extension; but it added the path with the .txt extension to the undo history causing the original file to get a .txt extension and the plain text conversion to remain without the .txt extension when trying to undo the action.
Action: Setting “file sectioning” to “search and collect sections” and leaving the “section collect” empty caused the action to crash instead of using the entire regex match as the section like “search for sections” does.
Action: Using the “target file creation” option to save search matches in combination with the “search” action type and file sectioning caused all the previous matches in the same section to be written again with each following match when multiple matches were found in the same section.
File Selector: Pressing Enter when the Path box has keyboard focus no longer makes a “ding” sound.
Sequence: Searching through files matched by another step didn’t work if those files were found in an archive or mailbox.

PowerGREP 5.3.2 – 8 July 2022

Improvement:

Manifest now includes longPathAware to indicate support for paths longer than 260 characters (which PowerGREP has had since version 5.0.0).

Bug fixes:

Action: A search-and-replace failed to start with an access violation error if file sectioning was used with “invert search results” and the search type of the main part of the action was “regular expression” or “free-spacing regular expression”.
Action: Aborting an action could sometimes crash PowerGREP with an access violation error.
Action: Collecting headers and footers with %MATCHCOUNT% in the target file footer produced an incorrect match count if matches from multiple source files were written to the same target file and “order of matches from different files” was set to “no particular order” or to “keep each file’s matches together”.
Action: Searching for a list of regular expressions with all regexes unticked except a single regex that finds zero-length matches with both the options “collect whole sections” and “list only sections matching all terms” ticked never found any matches as if “collect whole sections” was unticked.
Browsing for a folder no longer adds the \\?\ prefix to paths longer than 260 characters; PowerGREP adds this prefix internally if needed before passing long paths to the Windows API.
Compound documents were not copied correctly when a search-and-replace action was configured to make copies of modified files.
File Selector: Unplugging a drive on which you had a file or folder selected on the File Selector panel caused an error when PowerGREP tried to refresh its list of folders and files to reflect the removed drive.
File Selector|File Format Configuration: Moving a custom file format up or down when editing a file format configuration swapped the settings between the format that was moved and the format that it swapped positions with.
File Selector|Search Only Through Files with Results could cause PowerGREP to crash.
File Selector|Text Encoding Configuration: Moving a file format up or down when editing a text encoding configuration swapped the settings between the format that was moved and the format that it swapped positions with.
Filter Files: Requiring all terms to match with “non-overlapping searched” turned off with a list of regexes with named capturing groups in multiple regexes with backreferences in later parts of the action caused PowerGREP to crash.
Placeholders: A single extraneous character at the end of a placeholder option was ignored; e.g. %MATCH:LQ% was interpreted as %MATCH:L%.
Placeholders: Adapt case placeholder option has been removed because it hasn’t worked since it was first introduced in 2006.
Results: Matches at the start of the second and following lines in a block of context that spans multiple lines were not indented when context numbers were shown.
Results: Placing the cursor on the header line with the total number of matches for the action and clicking the Edit File button triggered an access violation error; now the Edit File button simply does nothing in this situation.
Text encodings to read files with: settings for detecting a file’s encoding are no longer used for files that start with a Unicode signature (Byte Order Marker or BOM).
WINE: 64-bit version failed to start on WINE 7.0 (since 5.1.1).

PowerGREP 5.3.1 – 21 September 2021

Improvements:

File Formats: EML files (email messages in MIME format) with headers larger than 16 KB are now processed correctly instead of claiming they’re not email messages; headers up to 64 KB in size are now handled correctly.
Preferences|Action: The minimum number of execution threads setting is no longer used by actions that do not look inside the contents of files; such actions now use one thread per drive if you enabled that option or one thread for the whole action if you did not; using multiple threads slows down such actions when the drive can’t keep up.

Bug fixes:

Action: A single regular expression that consists only of comments or free whitespace now triggers an error saying PowerGREP cannot use such a regex instead of finding a match at every position in every file.
Action: If previewing an action triggers an error in the part of a regular expression that is scrolled out of view then PowerGREP now scrolls that part into view.
Action: If the first regex in a list of regular expressions consists only of comments or free whitespace then PowerGREP now refuses to run the action saying it cannot use such a regex instead of crashing. If the second or following regexes in a list consist entirely of comments or whitespace then PowerGREP silently ignores those regexes, like it did before.
Editor|Next/Previous File were disabled for “list files”, “file or folder name search”, and “merge files” actions if “group search matches” was set to “per file” on the Results panel; they stepped through all files (including those not found by the action) if “group search matches” was set to “per file, with or without matches”.

PowerGREP 5.3.0 – 7 April 2021

Improvements:

Docs: Command line examples.
File Formats: PowerGREP can now use IFilters that implement IPersistStream instead of IPersistFile.
File Formats: Significantly increased the amount of time PowerGREP will wait for its PDF converter so that larger PDF files can be converted successfully on slower computers.
File Selector|Import: History of recently used regular expressions.

Bug fixes:

Action: Named backreferences were empty when they needed to substitute the match of an unnamed capturing group that got the name of the backreference from a named capturing group with that name in another alternative in a branch reset group.
Editor|Print failed with an “argument out of range” error if Editor|Print had been used before and Editor|Word Wrap was turned off.
File Formats: Outlook MSG files that are attached to other Outlook MSG files are now searched through when you set “file formats to convert to plain text” to include attachments.
File Sectioning: “Invert search results” did not work with the “simple search” action type.
File Selector: Right-clicking a folder and selecting Edit File now opens the folder in Windows Explorer instead of triggering an “invalid class typecast” error.
File Selector|Clear: Clearing a file selection that had file masks and then immediately executing the action caused the file selection to keep using the file masks that were cleared.
File Selector|Import: Preview of the previous import was not cleared when using the Import FIle Listings dialog box a second time.
File Selector|Import: Previewing the list of “file paths found in the selected file” in the Import File Listings dialog was much too slow.
PowerGREP failed to start with an error saying “cannot focus a disabled or invisible window” if PowerGREP was closed with a floating or closed Action panel.
Preferences|Cache: Dialog for selecting the cache folder does not show hidden folders (and thus not the default cache folder which is in the Temp folder inside the AppData folder which is hidden by default).
Results: If making or reverting replacements in a file on the Results panel and then starting a new action (which makes the Results panel try to save its changes and clear itself) resulted in a File Could Not Be Saved prompt (due to the file being read-only, for example) then clicking the Cancel Action button triggered an error instead of canceling the action.

PowerGREP 5.2.3 – 30 September 2020

Improvement:

Archive Formats: Predefined “zip archives only” and “zip and individually compressed” archive format configurations now restrict the “ZIP archives” archive format to the “*.zip” file mask so that they will no longer search through Java archives. This change does not alter previously saved file selections that used these archive format configurations. Those will continue to use the archive format settings they were saved with.

Bug fixes:

Executing several actions in a row could cause PowerGREP to find files that were deleted or renamed by previous actions if those files were explicitly marked.
File Formats: Replacements are now made correctly in compound documents that are embedded inside other compound documents.
Reducing the height of PowerGREP’s window now automatically adjusts the positions of the splitter bars on the Results and Library panels if needed to keep all parts of those panels visible.
Search-and-replace or search-and-delete actions could fail on audio files with an access violation error while converting the modified metadata back into the audio file’s metadata format.

PowerGREP 5.2.2 – 24 June 2020

Bug fixes:

Action: Deactivating search terms in a list of binary data failed with an access violation.
Action: Expand to whole lines option for context caused errors when the action was executed.
Action: Searching for a delimited list of binary data failed with an access violation.
File Formats: File names of attachments to emails in EML format were truncated at the first space.
Main window appears to have focus but floating panel actually has focus when first launching PowerGREP.
Preferences: Configure Text Layout buttons in the Editor and General (forum) sections of the Preferences updated the drop-down lists in the other section.
Regex: Placeholders referencing a non-existent capturing group triggered an access violation instead of an error saying the backreference is invalid if the regex did not contain any backreferences that don’t use the placeholder syntax.
Regex: POSIX classes using the \p notation matched only ASCII characters when used inside a character class along with other tokens instead of matching Unicode characters like they do outside character classes or when used alone in a character class.
Results: Grouping search matches per unique match now works for “file or folder name collect” actions.

PowerGREP 5.2.1 – 4 February 2020

Improvements:

Forum: Attachments can now be renamed while the message they are attached to has not been sent yet.
Pinned panels slide in and out faster.

Bug fixes:

Action: Searching for a single piece of literal text with “whole sections only” turned on never found any matches in files that use an encoding that uses the same number of bytes for every character.
File Selector: Expanding an archive, changing the archive format configuration to one that does search through that archive’s format, then changing the archive format configuration to one that does makes it impossible to expand the same archive again or to search through it until the file selection is refreshed.
File Selector: Invalid file masks were silently ignored if you did not mark an entire drive to be included in the action.
Help window no longer becomes unresponsive if PowerGREP shows a modal dialog box while the help window is already visible.
Match Placeholders: %FILENZ% and %FILENA% counted files starting from one like %FILEN% does instead of counting starting from zero or counting them with letters.
Match Placeholders: The Insert Match Placeholder dialog box did not list %FILEN%, %FILENZ%, and %FILENA%.
Regex: Attempting to execute an action containing a replacement string or text to be collected consisting of two or more valid named backreferences followed by a token that represents the entire regex match caused PowerGREP to hang.
Restoring PowerGREP by clicking the taskbar button gave keyboard focus to a floating panel if there was one instead of giving it to PowerGREP’s main window (5.2.0 only).
Results: Skipping making replacements in a file in a proprietary format because its target file path was already created for another source file during the same action triggered various errors when processing the remaining files in the action.
Searching and replacing through MIME email messages (separate or inside MBOX mailboxes) failed with access violation errors.
Significantly improved the reliability of searching and replacing through files in proprietary formats.

PowerGREP 5.2.0 – 6 September 2019

Improvements:

Forum: Long lists of conversations are now loaded faster.
Open in EditPad now supports EditPad Pro 8 and EditPad Lite 8.
Results/Editor: Search and Replace boxes on the bottom search toolbars now larger, particularly on high DPI systems.
Sequence icons have been changed to make sequences and actions a little easier to distinguish in libraries.
Tweaked some toolbar icons; Sequence icons are a bit more distinct from Action icons; commands for finding the next/previous match within the same file now have arrows that point up and down instead of left and right.

Bug fixes:

Action: \xFF escapes in the regular expression or replacement string were substituted with question marks instead of the actual byte in binary files for byte values that are unassigned in the computer’s default code page.
Action: File or folder name collect actions failed to create any target files when “target file creation” was set to “save one file for each searched file”.
Action: Loading an action from a file, a library, or a sequence sometimes set “target file creation” to “do not save results to file” instead of to the target setting that was stored in the file, library, or sequence.
Action: PowerGREP complained about invalid backup destination or location even after changing the backup type to “no backups”.
Action: Turning on file sectioning and then “invert search results” and then changing the action type to “count matches” without turning off file sectioning caused the action to fail with an error; this could be worked around by turning off “invert search results” before changing the action type.
File Selector|Clear Folder and its Files and Subfolders: Using this command on a drive and then marking a folder on the same drive ignores the file masks until the file masks are edited when using the same file masks for all folders.
Fonts scale more evenly on high DPI systems.
Library: File filtering search type was added to the description when not filtering files but not added when disallowing any terms to match; file filtering and context search terms were never added to the description.
Minimizing PowerGREP by clicking the taskbar button did not hide floating panels.
Results/Editor: Regex option on the bottom search toolbars skipped one character between matches.
Results: Making replacements in proprietary formats sometimes failed with an access violation error.
Results: The actual search term is now shown when counting matches of a single regular expression or a single binary search term; previously the search term was indicated as “1”.
Results: The value inserted by a match count placeholder such as %MATCHCOUNT:6Z% was off by one; the unpadded placeholder %MATCHCOUNT% was correct.
Results|Save: Results of “collect data” actions with “group results for all files” turned on were not saved correctly; attempting to load them produces an error about invalid XML.
Results|Save: Results of “count matches” actions were not correctly saved into .pgr files.
Setup: Running the installer with the /silent parameter from a command prompt without admin privileges now installs PowerGREP for the current user without an elevation prompt instead of doing nothing.
Silent installs from an elevated command prompt install PowerGREP for all users.
If PowerGREP was previously installed for all users or if the /userall parameter is passed on the command line, then silent installs from a command prompt without admin privileges trigger an elevation prompt.

PowerGREP 5.1.7 – 16 November 2018

Improvements:

Editor: Do not ask if unsaved changes should be saved when an action is using the editor both for its input and its output.
Editor: Do not ask if unsaved changes should be saved when multiple steps in a sequence use the editor for output.

Bug fixes:

Action: Actions that could potentially write matches from multiple source files into the same target file failed with an access violation.
Action: Collecting extra context after the match for a search-and-replace, search-and-delete, or rename files action with a list of search terms and “non-overlapping search” turned off could fail with an access violation.
Command line: Archives were not handled correctly when executing an action that includes archives with the /silent parameter.
Command line: Using one of the four /config parameters with a configuration that does not exist now shows an error saying the configuration does not exist instead of an error saying the configuration parameter is missing.
File Selector: Default file modification dates after loading a file selection that doesn’t use them are now today’s date instead of 30 December 1899.
Results: Double-clicking a replacement made in a file in a proprietary file format opened that file in the built-in editor as a binary file instead of opening its plain text conversion.

PowerGREP 5.1.6 – 27 June 2018

Improvement:

Results & Editor: Folding icons now scale better on high DPI systems.

Bug fixes:

Editor: Starting a new action while the editor had a file open with highlighted matches could cause access violation errors.
File Formats: Outlook MSG files that stored uncompressed RTF or non-RTF under the compressed RTF tag could cause PowerGREP to corrupt its memory leading to seemingly random hangs and/or access violation errors.

PowerGREP 5.1.5 – 16 May 2018

New documentation:

Examples: Update hyperlinks in Microsoft Office files.

Improvements:

Action/File Selector: Triangle button that opens history menus now scales the triangle on high DPI systems.
File Formats: The PERFORMER tag in FLAC metadata is now treated as a synonym of the ARTIST tag instead of as an unrecognized tag.
Windows 10: Installer now deals with Controlled Folder Access more efficiently when Windows Defender is operational and ignores it when Windows Defender is not operational, ensuring a smoother installation on Windows 10 1709 (Fall Creators Update) and 1803 (April 2018 Update).

Bug fixes:

Action: Renaming files actions that produced invalid paths for one or more files failed with an access violation instead of adding a proper error message to the results that the target path is not valid.
File Formats: XLSX converter used far too much memory on large XLSX files with many images, possibly running out of memory and crashing.
File Selector: Entering a path longer than 260 characters into the Path box no longer causes access violation errors or crashes.
Replacement of a zero-length match at the start of a section was not written to the target file.
Results: Double-clicking a file header after a search-and-replace that modified the original files highlighted the matches that were replaced (red strikeout) instead of the replacements that were made (green underline) on the Editor panel.
Results: Double-clicking the path of a backup file opened the target file rather than the backup copy.
Results: Line breaks were missing after lines ending with certain non-ASCII characters.

PowerGREP 5.1.4 – 30 January 2018

Improvements:

Windows 10: Installer adds PowerGREP as an allowed application to Controlled Folder Access in Windows Defender in the Fall Creators Update.
Windows 10: Installer no longer complains that it can’t create the desktop shortcut if that was blocked by Controlled Folder Access.

Bug fixes:

Action: Folder or file name search crashed with an “invalid typecast” error when the action had a search term and “target file creation” was set to “convert (copies of) matched files to text”.
Action: Folder or file name search ignored the “convert (copies of) matched files to text” choice for “target file creation” if there was no search term.
Editor: Saving a file did not register the new time stamp of the file, causing PowerGREP to claim the file was modified by another application when switching to another application and back to PowerGREP after saving.
Editor: Saving an existing file failed if the file was in use by another application even when that application did not keep a write lock on the file.
Unicode signature (byte order marker) for UTF-16 BE was not recognized by PowerGREP 5.x.x; such files could still be detected correctly by the method for detecting Unicode files without a Unicode signature.
Windows 10: Editor|Save now shows an “access denied” error message instead of pretending the file was saved successfully when overwriting an existing file is blocked by Controlled Folder Access.

PowerGREP 5.1.3 – 7 November 2017

New example:

Find bytes that are not part of valid UTF-8 sequences.

Improvements:

Editor: Automatically reloading a file when it was modified by another application now prompts before reloading and preserves the cursor position and selection after reloading.
File Selector: UNC paths now allow @ signs in the server and share names.
Placeholders: %MATCHFILENZ% can now be used in source file footers to collect the number of matches in each file.
Regex: (?(DEFINE)…) should not be a conditional even when there is a group named “DEFINE”.

Bug fixes:

Action: Collecting search matches or file names into a single file with “order of matches from different files” was set to anything other than “no particular order” or “keep each file’s matches together” collected the text that needs to go between files extraneously at the start of the target file (e.g. when delimiting files and matches with line breaks, there would be an extra line break at the start of the target file).
Action: Paste Escaped now uses the escape rules for replacement strings instead of those for regular expression when pasting into the Replace box.
Action: Source file footers were not collected when “target file creation” was set to “path placeholders” and “group identical matches” was off.
File Selector/Results: Menu items for editing a file in its associated application did not always indicate the correct application.
Placeholders: %FILECOUNT% did not work with all combinations of “target file creation” and “order of matches from different files”.
Placeholders: Path placeholders using a placeholder option (such as case conversion) caused “invalid pointer operation” errors when an action completed running if PowerGREP was configured to run actions using multiple threads (which it is by default).
Results: Text collected for matches of the regex \z was not shown when displaying matches with context for files that had other matches too.
Results: Text collected for matches of the regexes ^ and $ was not shown when displaying matches with context.
XLSX converter crashes on spreadsheets that contain unusual formulas.

PowerGREP 5.1.2 – 31 May 2017

Improvements:

Regex: Regular expressions or groups that start with recursion into the regex or the same group are now a syntax error; previously they would abort the search with an infinite recursion error.
Regex: Regular expressions with recursion that has no non-recursing alternative are now a syntax error because they could never match anything.

Bug fixes:

Editor: Printing a file for which PowerGREP does not use syntax coloring failed with an access violation.
File Formats: Searching through one or more PST files and then toggling whether attachments are searched through and then searching through the same PST files failed with access violation errors.
File Formats: Searching through UUencoded emails with attachments failed with an access violation error (since 5.0.2).
File Selector: Hide files and folders did not hide folders inside archives.
File Selector: History lists for “include folders” and “exclude folders” were always blank.
File Selector: Marking a drive for inclusion (single or double green tick mark) caused an access violation when running an action that searches through folder names.
File Selector|Delete Files: If some of the files to be deleted were inside archives then files in the last archive in the list were not deleted.
Results: Grouping results per unique match did not group the matches correctly when matches were sorted alphanumerically and the action didn’t group identical matches.
Results: Sorting matches alphanumerically did not always sort the matches correctly when the action did not group identical matches.

PowerGREP 5.1.1 – 9 May 2017

Improvements:

Action: Allow “search type” to be set to “binary data” when “file formats to convert to plain text” is set to “compound documents” (or any other file format configuration that only uses the “compound document” and/or “raw” options for all file formats).
Action: Multi-line edit controls no longer resize themselves while a list control has keyboard focus, so the list and its toolbar don’t jump around when you work with a list of search terms where some have many lines and some have few lines.
File Selector: Explicitly marking a folder with a double green tick mark now includes that folder and its subfolders in the search even when that folder is matched by the “exclude folders” mask; this behavior is now consistent with that for folders and files marked with a single green tick mark which are also included regardless of any exclusion masks.
File Selector: Import File Listing dialog can now be enlarged.

Bug fixes:

Action: Replacement strings that contain a backreference followed by a token that inserts the whole match triggered an access violation error that prevented the action from starting.
File Selector: Show Files with Results only showed folders containing files with results, but not the files themselves (since 5.0.0).
Proxy server settings were not saved (5.1.0 only).
Results: Actions that were aborted due to catastrophic backtracking in a regular expression used to filter files or find context now show a clear error message in the results.
Results: Actions that were aborted due to infinite recursion of a regular expression now show a clear error message in the results.
Results: Making replacements failed if “no backups” was selected on the Action panel and another backup option was selected in the Editor Preferences because it tried to create a backup using the “no backups” option instead of not creating any backups at all.
Results: When making replacements no backups were created if “no backups” was selected in the Editor Preferences.
Sequence: Comments box now wraps long lines.
Sequence: Steps with their own file selection with multiple folders marked now show those folders delimited with semicolons in the list of steps.

PowerGREP 5.1.0 – 28 March 2017

New features:

Archive Formats: ext2, ext3, and ext4 disk images.
Archive Formats: HFS+ disk images.
Archive Formats: NTFS disk images.
Archive Formats: RAR archive format now supports the RAR 5.0 format.
Examples: Collect a batch file or script to execute commands on each file.
Help|News & Updates: New version announcements and other news about PowerGREP and optionally other Just Great Software products can now be shown automatically or upon request.
Setup: Per-user installations that don’t require admin rights and that can create shortcuts and file associations.

Improvements:

Action: Target files can now overwrite files that have the hidden or system attribute set; previously this failed with an access denied error unless the target was moved to a backup location.
Backup file destination types that place backups in archives now create folder trees inside the archive when a folder is included with its subfolders and the target type is set to modify the original files or to place target files into a folder tree or archive.
Backup file destination types that place backups of files in different folders into the same folder or archive now ensure unique names are used for backups of files with the same name when the backup naming style allows multiple backups of files with a given name.
Backup file destination types that place backups of files in different folders into the same folder or archive now only back up the first file with a given name when the backup naming style always uses the same backup file name; the second and following files will not be modified at all and have an error added to the results.
Clipboard: File listings can now be imported from the clipboard; this allows you to set up an action that searches through the files that were copied to the clipboard by a file manager.
Clipboard: If you copied a list of files to the clipboard using Windows Explorer then the path clipboard:clipboard.txt now contains that list of files.
File Formats: XLS and XLSX files that contain large numbers of blank cells are now converted to plain text much faster.
File Selector: Explore folder command now uses the system’s default file manager rather than always using Windows Explorer.
Preferences|External Editors: Options to configure external editors to open files, archives, and/or folders.
Preferences|General: Explorer context menu items now show PowerGREP’s icon (to add the icon to existing context menu items, the menu items need to be removed and then recreated).
Sequence: Adding, deleting, and reordering steps now preserves file selection references between steps.
Sequence: Show file selection details for steps that have their own file selection.

Bug fixes:

Action: File or folder name collect actions produced no results if “order of matches from different files” was set to anything other than “no particular order”.
Action: If the second or following regex in a list of regular expressions had a syntax error and you attempted to preview or execute the action then the first time it would show an appropriate error message but the second time it would fail with an access violation.
Backup files were not created (and thus files were not modified) when you marked a folder inside an archive and set “backup file destination type” to “folder tree”.
File Formats: Currency values in XLS files now correctly show the currency symbol.
File Selector: Selecting a configuration via the (...) button no longer changes the default configuration; default configurations can be selected in the Preferences.
Results|Next File: If the cursor is in the middle of or to the left of a line break or indentation space then Results|Next File went to the next line instead of to the next file.
Sequence: A step that used the file selection from another step which used the file selection from the File Selector did not search through any files at all.

PowerGREP 5.0.6 – 25 January 2017

Bug fixes:

Actions using the “convert matches files to text” or “convert copies of matches files to text” target type could not be executed (5.0.4 and 5.0.5 only).
Actions using the “count matches” action type could not be previewed or executed (5.0.4 and 5.0.5 only).
Archive Formats: Searching through individually compressed files (.gz, .bz2, .lzma, and .xz) caused PowerGREP to crash (5.0.3 through 5.0.5).
Editor: Saving a file stored inside an archive failed with an access violation if a backup copy needed to be created.
File Formats: Converter crashes on certain XLSX files.

PowerGREP 5.0.5 – 6 January 2017

Improvements:

Editor: Double-clicking highlighted links now opens them.
Proxy password is now encrypted when stored in the .ini file.

Bug fixes:

Action: Compressed archive target type now checks that the target location is for an archive format that PowerGREP can create before running the action; previously it would accept any archive format, which would cause the action to fail with various errors if the archive format was not writable.
File Formats: Files with a .doc extension that are actually DOCX files are are now converted correctly to plain text instead of failing with various errors complaining the file is corrupted.
File Formats: PowerGREP freezes on certain DOCX files. (Memory corruption when reading XML attributes with more than 65,536 characters.)

PowerGREP 5.0.4 – 15 December 2016

Improvements:

Action: Single file target file location is now validated before running the action so that invalid paths prevent the action from running instead of failing to save the file at the end.
Action: Target file locations that prefixed with .\ to explicitly make them relative paths are now interpreted correctly (the prefix is not needed; a path that does not start with a drive letter or share name is always a relative path).
Action: Target path validation for renaming, splitting, and merging files or building target paths using path placeholders no longer allows trailing dots in file and folder names.
Archive Formats: RPM archives internally compressed with BZip2 or XZ.

Bug fixes:

Library: Sequence steps that referenced file selections from other steps did not retain the number of that step when added to or loaded from a library.
Results: Executing a sequence now shows the progress meter for all steps instead of just the first step.
Sequence: Results of the first step in a sequence were not initialized correctly, which could cause crashes or incorrect results in certain circumstances (5.0.x only).
Windows 10: If one editor has keyboard focus and the mouse pointer is on top of another, then rotating the mouse wheel scrolled both editors instead of just the one pointed to by the mouse.

PowerGREP 4.7.3 – 15 December 2016

Improvement:

Windows 10: Mouse wheel scrolls the control pointed to by the mouse pointer instead of the control that has keyboard focus.

Bug fixes:

Action: %LINENA% and %SECTIONNA% match placeholders were substituted with nothing instead of line numbers.
Library: Sequence steps that referenced file selections from other steps did not retain the number of that step when added to or loaded from a library.
Preferences, Colors: Choosing the same color for the editor background now immediately adjust the cursor’s color to make it visible instead of requiring you to OK the preferences a second time.
Results: Executing a sequence now shows the progress meter for all steps instead of just the first step.

PowerGREP 5.0.3 – 24 November 2016

Bug fixes:

Action: Path placeholders and match placeholders triggered a false “regular expression error” message with no actual error message (5.0.2 only).
Action: Placeholders referencing an existing capturing group triggered a false “backreference to undefined named capturing group” error (5.0.2 only).
File Formats: Outlook PST that contained messages with a completely blank RTF body caused an access violation.
Preferences, Colors: Choosing the same color for the editor background now immediately adjust the cursor’s color to make it visible instead of requiring you to OK the preferences a second time.

PowerGREP 5.0.2 – 31 October 2016

Improvements:

File Formats: Email messages in Outlook PST files that store the message body in RTF or HTML only are now always converted to plain text when not searching through email attachments as PowerGREP already did for Outlook MSG files.
File Formats: Email messages now contain an extra file called headers.txt or 0.txt that contains a plain text conversion of the basic email headers when searching through emails and their attachments.
File Formats: Plain text conversion of email messages in Outlook PST files now includes the same basic headers as the plain text conversion of Outlook MSG files and MIME email messages already did when searching through emails but not through their attachments.

Bug fixes:

About box and trial version messages caused PowerGREP to crash on Windows Vista 64-bit.
Action: %LINEN%, %LINENZ%, %LINENA%, %SECTIONN%, %SECTIONNZ%, and %SECTIONNA% match placeholders were substituted with nothing instead of line numbers.
Action: Renaming a folder with the old and new names being the same but with differences in case caused the folder to be deleted.
Action: Source file footer is collected twice when using “group identical matches” with a “collect data” action that collects the matches from each source file into a separate target file.
Action: Source file header and footer options are no longer shown when using “group matches for all files” as these are not used in this case.
Archive Formats: If an archive contains two files where the path of one file in the archive appears entirely at the start of the path of another file in the archive, then PowerGREP sometimes extracted the file with the longer path when it needed to extract the file with the shorter path.
Command line: /masks parameter attempted to open its last two (out of five) values as files.
Command line: If less than 5 values were passed to the /masks parameter, PowerGREP indicated /masks needs 3 values rather than 5 (it needed only 3 values in PowerGREP 4 but it needs 5 values in PowerGREP 5).
File Formats: Items after a multipart item inside a multipart MIME email were ignored by PowerGREP when searching through emails and their attachments.
File Formats: Searching through some Outlook MSG files caused PowerGREP to hang or crash.
File Formats: Some Outlook PST files failed to be searched through due to PowerGREP not allowing certain areas of the PST file to be missing.
File Selector: File masks that included a compound document did not include the files inside the compound document.
Results: Making or reverting replacements on the Results panel failed with an access violation on files that use one of the new two-way converters that allow replacements to be made in plain text conversions.
Results: No error messages were added to the results for files that could not be overwritten for actions that do not create backup copies.

PowerGREP 5.0.1 – 23 September 2016

Improvements:

File Selector: File listing (to be imported when executing the action) can now be cleared by importing an empty list of files.

Bug fixes:

Action: Backreferences to named capturing groups inside replacement string conditionals prevented the action from starting
Action: Executing a “split files” action failed with an access violation if “between collected text” was set to “nothing”.
Action: File or folder name collect now collects each file or folder only once, even when it has multiple regex matches, just like file or folder name search only lists each file or folder once.
Action: Regexes with non-capturing groups that contained only free whitespace and had a quantifier triggered an access violation error that prevented the action from starting.
Action: Target path validation for renaming, splitting, and merging files or building target paths using path placeholders did not accept UNC paths.
File Selector: Clicking the Import button when there is no previous file listing automatically used the selected file for importing even when canceling the dialog.
File Selector: Importing file listings did not recognize UNC paths.
Results: File name search said “0 matches in X files” instead of “X files found”.
Results: Opening a PowerGREP Results file saved in PowerGREP 4 or earlier that contains matches in files inside archives failed with an access violation.

PowerGREP 4.7.2 – 23 September 2016

Improvements:

File Selector: File listing (to be imported when executing the action) can now be cleared by importing an empty list of files.

Bug fixes:

File Selector: Clicking the Import button when there is no previous file listing automatically used the selected file for importing even when canceling the dialog.
Undo History: Deleting the last item in the undo history no longer leaves the details of that item visible.

PowerGREP 5.0.0 – 6 September 2016

New features:

Action Type: Count matches: Indicate how many times each search term was matched in each file or in the overall action. This can be used to find out if certain search terms do not occur in any of the files.
Action Type: File or folder name collect: Search through file and/or folder names and collect text using backreferences or path placeholders. This can be used to build scripts or batch files or other file listings that include more than just the path to the file.
Action/Results: Alphanumeric sort option for matches in addition to the alphabetic sort option.
Action: “Convert text files” and “Copy and convert text files” target types for “list files” and “file name search” actions that make text encoding and line break style options available which allow files to be converted to a particular line break style and/or text encoding as well as to save copies of plain text conversions of files in proprietary formats.
Archive Formats: *.lz;*.lzma compressed single files and *.tar.lzma compressed tarballs.
Archive Formats: CPIO archives (read-only), including those compressed with GZip, BZip, LZMA, or XZ.
Archive Formats: MBOX email (qmail, Thunderbird, etc.).
Archive Formats: Outlook Express (*.dbx).
Archive Formats: Outlook mail folder *.pst.
Clipboard: Copy to clipboard target type for all action types that can save results to a single file. PowerGREP will not put more than 100 MB worth of text onto the clipboard to prevent other applications from choking if the clipboard contains more text than they can handle.
Clipboard: Double-clicking a clipboard: path in the Results or right-clicking a node under the Clipboard node in the File Selector and selecting Edit opens the contents of the clipboard in PowerGREP’s built-in Editor; saving changes in the Editor updates the clipboard.
Clipboard: File paths in the form of clipboad:clipboard.txt can be used anywhere on the Action panel to point to clipboard data; such paths are also used on the Results panel to indicate search results on the clipboard.
Clipboard: File Selector has a Clipboard node with the currently available clipboard formats as nodes under it which can be marked to make an action operate on the contents of the clipboard.
Command line: /count and /collectname parameters for the new “count matches” and “file or folder name collect” action types.
Editor: File paths in the form of editor:filename.ext can be used anywhere on the Action panel to point to the file open in PowerGREP’s built-in editor; such paths are also used on the Results panel to indicate search results in the built-in editor.
Editor: File Selector and an Editor node that lets you mark the contents of the built-in editor as a file (even if the editor has an unsaved file open).
Editor: Reload files modified on disk automatically when switching from another application to PowerGREP or when switching from another panel to the Editor panel within PowerGREP.
Editor: Store in editor target type for all action types that can save results to a single file.
File Formats: AceText collection.
File Formats: Audio files (MP3, FLAC, etc.).
File Formats: CorelDRAW (*.cdr).
File Formats: Custom file formats that can be converted by running a command line application using either standard I/O or temporary files.
File Formats: DOCX files (Word 2007 and later) are now handled by a built-in decoder which allows replacements to be made.
File Formats: HTML files as plain text.
File Formats: JPEG (EXIF).
File Formats: MHT (web page saved as single file by IE) can be converted to plain text or treated as a compound document.
File Formats: ODT files (OpenOffice Writer) are now handled by a built-in decoder which allows replacements to be made.
File Formats: Outlook email message (*.msg) and Outlook attachments (winmail.dat).
File Formats: PDF files can now have their text converted in reading order instead of mimicing the visual page layout.
File Formats: RTF files as plain text.
File Formats: Single email message in MIME format (*.eml) or UUencode format converted to plain text or as a compound document.
File Formats: Windows shell links (*.lnk).
File Formats: XPS and OXPS.
Forum: +1 button that adds a “me too” vote to an issue such as a bug report or feature request.
Forum: Ability to filter down to conversations one participated in.
Forum: Ability to show complete conversations while searching.
Forum: Email notification level that includes conversations that you gave a +1 in addition to conversations that you participated in.
Forum: Server side search to search through the message bodies of all conversations, including ones you haven’t viewed.
Library: Update with current settings: Replace the item selected in the library with the settings from the corresponding panel.
Placeholders: %FILECOUNT% can be used in target file footers to write the number of source files that had their matches written to that target file.
Placeholders: %TERMN% placeholder that is replaced with the number of the regular expression in a list of regular expressions that found the match.
Preferences|Cache: Erase cache.
Preferences|Cache: Indicate amount of disk space presently being used by the conversion cache.
Preferences|Cache: Trim cache: Delete all cached conversions of files that have been modified or deleted.
Preferences|File Selector: Files and folders tree now has configurable colors and font.
Regex: .NET-style capturing group subtraction (group balancing).
Regex: \h is a shorthand for horizontal whitespace.
Regex: \K keeps the text matched so far out of the match results.
Regex: \o{377} is now an octal escape and \0337 is now an error.
Regex: \R matches any line break, including Unicode line breaks, and treats CRLF pairs as indivisible.
Regex: \v is now a shorthand for all vertical whitespace instead of a character escape for the vertical tab.
Regex: Branch reset groups.
Regex: Character class intersection [left&&[right]].
Regex: Regular expression recursion and subroutines.
Regex: Relative backreferences \k<-1> and \k<+1>.
Regex: Replacement string conditionals in the form of (?1matched:unmatched), (?{name}matched:unmatched), ${1:+matched:unmatched} and ${name:+matched:unmatched}.
Regex: XML shorthand character classes.

Improvements:

Action: Alt+S shows the Action panel as needed and then activates the Search box if pressed when the Action panel is not visible.
Action: Attempting to execute an action that contains a regular expression that is too long for PowerGREP to handle now triggers a clear error message, instead of a crash. Syntax highlighting highlights the tail end of the regex in red to indicate just how much too long the regex is.
Action: Collect data actions that use file sectioning with “collect/replace whole sections” or “invert search results” turned on can now use backreferences to named capturing groups in the text to be collected.
Action: File name search action type was renamed to “file or folder name search” as it can search for folders instead of or in addition to files, with target options to copy/move/delete matching folders as a whole or to copy/move the individual files inside matching folders.
Action: Invert search results for “list files” actions is now shown at the top of the Action panel even when using file sectioning to make it more obvious that it is the list of files that is being inverted, rather than the sections.
Action: Invert search results is now available for “merge files” actions allowing files without search matches to be merged.
Action: Rename files action type was renamed to “rename files or folders” as it can now directly rename folders instead of or in addition to renaming files.
Action: Resize multi-line edit controls automatically based on the number of lines of text they contain to reduce the need to scroll controls with many lines and to reduce space wasted for controls with little or no text.
Archive Formats: Archive format settings are now made in the File Selector rather than in the preferences because the action may depend on them.
Archive Formats: Archives are now globbed during the grepping phase so that the archive needs to be opened only once during the search, resulting in a (much) shorter globbing phase, and better overall performance as the archive needs to be opened only once rather than twice during the search.
Command Line: /masks now takes 5 instead of 3 values to allow inclusion and exclusion masks for folders to be specified.
Command line: /configconvert, /configarchives, /configencoding, and /confighide parameters to use a predefined configuration; /optarchives is no longer supported.
Editor: When saving files that are part of the search results, use the backup naming style from the Action instead of from the Editor Preferences.
File Formats: DOC files that are technically RTF or HTML files rather than Word documents are now converted to plain text instead of triggering an error that the file is not a Word document.
File Formats: DOC files with text in non-Latin scripts are now handled correctly by PowerGREP’s built-in converter removing the need to use the IFilter for them.
File Formats: File format settings are now made in the File Selector rather than in the preferences because the action may depend on them.
File Formats: Files that are zero bytes in size are no longer treated as files that require conversion to reduce the number of errors about files that could not be converted.
File Formats: If the conversion cache grows beyond the allowed size while a search is in progress, it is now trimmed to 95% of the allowed size, to avoid having to continuously trim the cache as new files are added.
File Formats: Only cache conversions of files that take a significant amount of time to be converted.
File Formats: PDF conversion is now more reliable.
File Formats: Stop using the conversion cache for the remainder of the action when it is too small to hold the files converted by a single action.
File Formats: Timeout for the PDF, XLS, and IFilter converters adjusts itself to the size of the file being converted to allow very large files to be converted, and to time out sooner when the converter hangs on a small file.
File paths longer than 260 characters are now supported everywhere except in Open and Save dialogs (which are handled by the Windows shell which does not support long paths).
File Selector: Alt+2 and Alt+I show the File Selector panel and then activate the “files and folders” tree or the “include files” editor.
File Selector/Results: Alphanumeric instead of alphabetic sort order so that files and folders with numbers in their names are sorted logically.
File Selector: “Include folders” and “exclude folders” boxes to include or exclude folders and archives from the search based on their names. Excluding folders using “exclude folders” is more efficient than using file masks with backslashes with “exclude files” as PowerGREP does not need to glob folders that are excluded entirely.
File Selector: Changes to settings on the File Selector panel are now applied instantly to the files and folders tree, even after having searched through large numbers of files (e.g. the entire C drive).
File Selector: Commands to mark or exclude files with results are now submenus with options to mark or exclude matched files, unmatched files, or target files.
File Selector: File sizes are no longer rounded to the nearest kiB, MiB, or GiB and numbers beyond 32767 can be entered, making searches for exact file sizes possible. Sizes can now be specified as multiples of 1,000 (kB, MB, GB) as well as multiples of 1,024 (kiB, MiB, GiB).
File Selector: Files that are inside a folder that is included but are excluded by the file format configuration, by an exclusion mask, by file date, or by file size are now indicated with gray X marks instead of having no marks.
File Selector: Generic icons for all files; file-specific icons may be slow to retrieve due to interference by on-access virus scanners like Microsoft Security Essentials.
File Selector: Include Masks and Exclude Masks boxes now reduce their size if they contain little or no text, giving more space to the files and folders tree.
File Selector: Permanent exclusion settings are now labeled as “hide files and folders” since that is what these settings really do to the File Selector panel and to differentiate them from the “exclude files” and “exclude folders” boxes in the File Masks part of the File Selector panel.
File Selector: Permanent exclusion settings are now made in the File Selector rather than in the Preferences because the action may depend on them.
File Selector: Text encoding settings are now made in the File Selector rather than in the Preferences because the action may depend on them.
File Selector: Tick and X marks that indicate whether files are included or excluded are now scaled on high DPI systems, making them the same size as the file and folder icons they sit next to.
Forum: Edited dates are now shown relative to the posted date if the time gap between now and the edited date is larger than the time gap between the posted date and the edited date.
Forum: Editing the summary of a message now also updates the subject of the conversation if it is the same as the old summary of the message.
Forum: Reply dates are now shown relative to the starting date if the time gap between now and the reply is larger than the time gap between the reply and the start of the conversation.
Forum: Sort attachments by clicking column headers in the list.
Placeholders: %FILESIZEKB%, %FILESIZEMB%, and %FILESIZEGB% now use multiples of 1,000 with the new placeholders %FILESIZEKIB%, %FILESIZEMIB%, and %FILESIZEGIB% using multiples of 1,024.
Placeholders: %MATCHCOUNT% can now be used in source and target file footers to write the number of matches found in the source file or the number of matches written to the target file.
Placeholders: %GUID1% through %GUID9% which allow up to nine GUIDs to be inserted in multiple places by an action or sequence and remain constant throughout the execution of the action or sequence, but change each time the action or sequence is executed.
Placeholders: %GUIDFILE% which allows the same GUID to be inserted multiple times in a file, while inserting a different GUID in each file.
Placeholders: Placeholder options are now supported on backreference placeholders in regular expressions.
Placeholders: Placeholders with details about the action or the current file are now supported in “collect headers and footers”.
Preferences|File Selector: Default choices for file formats, archive formats, text encodings, and permanent exclusion that are used when clearing the file selection and when starting PowerGREP without a file selection.
Regex: Invalid backreferences in the replacement string are now treated as errors that prevent the action from being executed.
Results: Use fountain colors even when grouping unique matches.
Results: When making replacements, use the backup naming style from the Action instead of from the Editor Preferences.
Sequence: Commands to directly load/store file selections and actions from/into a library.
Splitter positions on the Library, Undo History, and Forum panels are preserved when restarting PowerGREP and when saving custom layouts.
Toolbar icons now support all 10 display scaling settings from 100% to 400% available in the basic display settings in Windows, allowing PowerGREP to properly scale its toolbars on all PC and laptop displays on the market today.
Undo History: Track folders that were created, and remove those folders if they are empty after undoing the action.
Windows 10: Mouse wheel scrolls the control pointed to by the mouse pointer instead of the control that has keyboard focus.

PowerGREP 4.7.1 – 14 June 2016

Improvements:

Library: Adding or editing an item in the library now scrolls the list to keep the selected item in view.
Library: Editing an item’s description now immediately puts it in the correct alphabetical order.

Bug fixes:

Action: Invert search results for “list files” actions when using file sectioning now inverts the list of files instead of failing with an access violation.
Action: Search and collect data actions that group identical matches ignored the “path placeholders” target file creation option.
Archive Formats: Files inside a folder with a name that is exactly one character long inside an archive were not handled correctly.
File Formats: Excel converter crashed on certain XLSX files.
File Formats: Fixed several issues with decoding WordPerfect files.

PowerGREP 4.7.0 – 24 September 2015

Improvements:

Installer no longer asks to accept the license agreement if you already have PowerGREP 4.x.x installed.
Installer now puts a single shortcut directly in the Start menu which better fits the Start menu on Windows 10.
Windows 10: New look for the menus and toolbars on Windows 10 to add a bit more contrast to PowerGREP’s user interface.

Bug fixes:

Action: Collect data actions that operated on files in proprietary formats and that collected matches into multiple files or specified an order for the collected matches failed with an access violation error for each file upon execution (but not when previewing).
Action: List files action that use “filter files” but do not use a search term in the main part of the action reported an access violation error for each file on the Results panel.
File Selector: Selecting a different folder via the Path box did not update include files and exclude files boxes when not using the same mask for all folders.
Results: Open matched files in EditPad does not open all matched files when EditPad is not yet running.
Results: Search-and-replace for multiple terms with “list only sections matching all terms” turned on (incorrectly) listed replacements in sections that matched only some terms even though (correctly) those replacements were not actually made.
Results: Searching incrementally through the contents of the Results panel using toolbar at the bottom, then clearing the results, and then changing something on the search toolbar triggered an access violation.
View|Dual Monitor: The floating window took up the size of the entire second monitor, which caused it to appear behind the taskbar if the taskbar was on that monitor.

PowerGREP 4.6.5 – 4 May 2015

Bug fixes:

Communication with the conversion manager and the undo manager could fail if PowerGREP was using more than 4 GB of RAM.
Occasional random crashes when a single 64-bit PowerGREP instance was using more than 4 GB of memory (or an immediate crash on startup when the AllocationPreference registry key forces memory to be allocated from the top down).
Placeholders: %MATCHSTART% counts from zero instead of one and %MATCHSTARTZ% counts from -1 instead of zero; resolved by changing the documentation for %MATCHSTART% and removing %MATCHSTARTZ%; %MATCHSTART:+1% can be used to start counting from one; the same goes for %MATCHSTOP% and group placeholders like %GROUP1START%.
Regex: Certain combinations of nested capturing and non-capturing groups triggered an access violation when attempting to execute the action.
Regex: Syntax highlighting indicated numbered backreferences that use the syntax for named backreferences as errors even though PowerGREP allows such backreferences (as long as there is a group with the specified number).
Windows 8 and 8.1: The edges of the panels on the main window are now gray like they are on previous versions of Windows, instead of blue.

PowerGREP 4.6.4 – 26 January 2015

Improvement:

Archive Formats: RPM files using LZMA instead of GZIP compression are now supported.

Bug fixes:

File Selector: Loading a file selection that had individual files marked in multiple folders and running a search and expanding those folders on the File Selector panel for the first time after running the search made PowerGREP think the folders contained only the marked files.
File Selector: Loading a file selection that was created outside PowerGREP and that did not have its folder and file elements sorted alphabetically by their name attributes caused PowerGREP to act as if the out-of-order files and folders did not exist.
Search type: Delimited literal text consisting of search and replace pairs triggered an access violation when attempting to execute the action (4.6.3 only).

PowerGREP 4.6.3 – 17 December 2014

Improvements:

Rename Files: Check whether the path produced by the replacement text is syntactically valid and show an error if it is not rather than attempting to rename the file to an obviously invalid path.

Bug fixes:

Action: Collect data actions that use file sectioning with “collect/replace whole sections” or “invert search results” turned on now correctly substitute placeholders in the text to be collected.
Conversion manager would lock up and tie up one CPU core when the cache was not large enough to hold all files, causing PowerGREP to show errors about being unable to connect to the conversion manager.
Create Portable Installation: Creating a portable install via the Help menu of a hard drive install failed to copy the file PowerGREP4IFilter.exe.
Editor|Save As did not update the window caption.
Preferences|Action: Delete files to the Window Recycle Bin option was not saved to the preferences, causing it to be turned on when restarting PowerGREP.
Preferences|Text Encoding: Deleting all text encoding definitions and clicking OK made the Preferences dialog inaccessible.

PowerGREP 4.6.2 – 8 September 2014

Improvements:

Action: Changing the search type from a list to a single item and then back without editing the item restores the previous list, allowing accidental changes to the search type to be undone.
Action: Changing the search type from a list to a single item now keeps the item that was selected in the list (if it is not blank) instead of keeping the first enabled non-blank item in the list.
HTML meta tag detection now ignores meta tags that specify impossible character sets.

Bug fixes:

File Formats: IFilter conversion process crashed if a file format was configured to use an IFilter and an IFilter DLL was registered for it and the DLL could not be loaded (4.6.x only). This happened for DOCX files on a clean install of Windows 7.
File Selector: Delimited file masks were not handled correctly if the second or following file mask had a literal space inside the file mask.

PowerGREP 4.6.1 – 9 June 2014

Improvement:

Preferences, File Formats: IFilter file masks now include *.od[bcfgimpst] so that PowerGREP will use the OpenOffice or LibreOffice IFilter for OpenDocument Format files if you have OpenOffice or LibreOffice installed.

Bug fixes:

Archive Formats: ISO images using the UDF file system were not searched through (4.3.0).
Archive Formats: RPM archives were not searched through (4.3.0).
File Formats: PowerGREP did not always search through or show all sheets in XLS files with graphs and multiple sheets.
PowerGREP crashed at startup if the first or only syntax coloring scheme or the first or only file navigation scheme in %APPDATA%\JGsoft\PowerGREP 4 did not define any file masks.
Regular expressions in the form of (?<=lookbehind).* performed very poorly when the “dot matches newlines” option was off.
Results: Replacements that had a line break immediately before the last character in the replacement were displayed without that final character. Only the display on the Results panel was affected. Actual replacements were made correctly.

PowerGREP 4.6.0 – 26 November 2013

Improvements:

File Formats: IFilter conversion is now done in a separate process so that crashes or hangs in 3rd party IFilter DLLs do not bring down PowerGREP; it also allows multiple files to be converted simultaneously.
File Formats: XLS and XLSX text conversion no longer adds trailing blank rows and columns.
Help: Better workaround for the bug in IE 9 that causes 64-bit applications to crash when using HTML Help, allowing PowerGREP to show the correct help topics instead of the first page of the help file.
Preferences|General: Adding PowerGREP to the right-click of folders in Windows Explorer now also adds it to the right-click menu of the folder background (empty area in a folder view) in Windows Explorer.
RegexBuddy: Portable installs of PowerGREP can now integrate with portable installs of RegexBuddy 4.
RegexBuddy: When sending a list of regexes to RegexBuddy, make RegexBuddy activate the one selected in PowerGREP rather than the first one. Requires RegexBuddy 4.0.0 or later.

Bug fixes:

Action: File name search fails with an access violation when it needs to copy or move zipped documents.
Archives: Errors that occur while creating or updating archives are now handled correctly.
File Formats: IFilter conversion crashed if the file was inside an archive and your preferences were set such that the file would only need IFilter conversion if it was either binary or plain text; IFilter conversion worked correctly if the file was not inside an archive or if your preferences for that type of file were set to always use IFilter conversion.
File Formats: Some XLS and XLSX files caused the converter process to crash.
Forum continued to use the old proxy settings until you restarted PowerGREP if you changed the proxy settings after having successfully connected to the forum.
Library: Double-clicking the blank space below the last item in the list caused a harmless access violation error.

PowerGREP 4.5.1 – 7 June 2013

Bug fixes:

Action: Setting “target file creation” to “copy all searched files” caused PowerGREP to move instead of copy all files that were searched through but in which no replacements were made.
Action: Toggling “invert search results” for search-and-replace actions did not correctly update the replacement text shown in the main part of the action when the search type for the main part of the action was a list.
Encoding: XML files with XML declarations that specify an invalid or unsupported encoding are no longer skipped with an error about the encoding when the “detect XML encoding” option is turn on in Preferences, Encoding; they are now processed as if the files didn’t have an XML declaration at all.
File Formats: Portable installs of PowerGREP failed to search through files in proprietary formats unless either the conversion cache folder was set to the default for portable installs (“Conversion Cache” subfolder of PowerGREP’s installation folder) or both cache sizes were set to zero in the File Formats section in the Preferences.
Installer: Create Portable Installation failed if the user does not have sufficient access rights for a normal installation.
Regex: Regular expressions starting with \Z or starting with a lookbehind followed by \Z that could not find a match before the final line break in the file (because of the lookbehind or whatever follows \Z) caused PowerGREP to hang if the file ended with a line break.

PowerGREP 4.5.0 – 20 March 2013

Improvements:

Action: Do not highlight matching brackets in literal text as doing so may confuse the user into thinking they have a special meaning, which they don’t.
File Selector: Automatically add and remove drive letters as they are added and removed in Windows.
Forum: SOCKS proxy server support.
Results: Make/Revert Replacements commands now show a progress meter when processing more than one file.
Results: Make/Revert Replacements in All Files are now disabled for actions that produce more search matches than PowerGREP can hold in memory at a time, because PowerGREP won’t be able to make or revert the replacements that didn’t fit into memory.
Results: Setting the same bookmark at the same position removes it; setting a different bookmark at the same position sets it and removes the old bookmark.
Results|Export: Exported HTML files now include a Content-Type meta tag to indicate the character set.

Bug fixes:

Action: Insert File now converts line breaks to CRLF to make sure that loading a list with delimited search terms works correctly even if the file uses a different line break style.
Action: Paste Escaped does nothing when the clipboard holds text copied by the same PowerGREP instance.
Action: Search-and-replace or search-and-delete with the 3 options “file sectioning”, “invert search results”, and “context type” turned on caused the replacements to be made incorrectly.
Command line: Specifying an empty string “” as the encoding caused PowerGREP to crash.
File Formats: Excel converter no longer crashes on files that are open in Excel.
File Formats: Files in proprietary formats that could not be converted because another application has a lock on them are no longer added to the conversion cache as files that cannot be converted; when you try to search the file again PowerGREP will attempt the conversion again instead of saying the file could not be converted previously.
File Formats: PowerGREP sometimes crashed with an out of memory error when trying to decode a WordPerfect document.
Insert path placeholders: Example column is empty until you edit the example path.
Preferences, File Formats: Maximum cache size while not running caused the cache to be trimmed each time an action that searched through files in proprietary formats completed running instead of only when closing PowerGREP if you did not open a file in a proprietary format in PowerGREP’s built-in editor.
Preferences, File Formats: The file masks you specified for “Only use IFilter for...” and “Never use IFilter for...” were only used after you clicked OK in the Preferences. Next time you restarted PowerGREP it would use the default file masks, even though the Preferences dialog remembered your file masks.
Regex: Zero-repeated groups like (group){0} were matched as if they were optional groups like (group){0,1}.
Results: Double-clicking context or a context number in the results of a search-and-replace correctly opened the target file in PowerGREP’s built-in editor, but did not always correctly select the context that was double-clicked.
Results: Making or reverting replacements did not update the highlighting if the replacements were made in copies of the files rather than in the original files, and the file the replacements were made or reverted in was not open on the Editor panel.
WINE: Running PowerGREP on Linux using WINE caused access violation errors when interacting with the files and folders tree on the File Selector panel.

PowerGREP 4.4.0 – 1 November 2012

New features:

Placeholders: %FILEN% placeholder that is incremented for each file searched through, allowing unique sequential IDs to be generated for each file.
Placeholders: %GUID% inserts a newly generated GUID into the replacement text; each replacement will get a different GUID.

Improvements:

64-bit: Indicate x86, x64, or WOW64 in the About box to indicate whether you’re running the 32-bit version on 32-bit Windows, the 64-bit version on 64-bit Windows, or the 32-bit version on 64-bit Windows.
File Selector: The Search Archives option is now remembered when you restart PowerGREP, even if you turn off the option to remember the file selection in the File Selector section in the Preferences.
Import File Listing dialog now automatically gets scrollbars if it is too large to fit on the screen, which may happen when using large fonts or a small screen.
Undo History: Disable commands that work on a selection in the undo history when the Undo History panel is closed.
Windows 8: Uninstall shortcut is no longer pinned to the start screen by the installer (but it won’t unpin any shortcuts that were previously pinned).

Bug fixes:

Action: Collect data actions that used line breaks as the delimiter between matches stopped adding those line breaks if a file used a different encoding than the previous file processed by the same thread.
Archives: “List files” actions without a search term failed to delete, copy, or move files found inside archives.
Command Line: /delimitprefix, /delimitsearch, and /delimitreplace now interpret the strings “Line break”, “Tab”, and “None” in the same way the drop-down lists on the Action panel interpret them: as an actual line break, tab, or a blank string.
Placeholders: Path placeholders in the search term did not work correctly if the search was case insensitive and the part of the path represented by the placeholder contained uppercase letters.
Preferences, General: Removing folder associations did not work.
Results: Alt+F6 key combinations for replacing and reverting matches had no effect on the Results panel.
Sequence: Executing a sequence and then executing a separate action and then double-clicking a step in the sequence to load its results sometimes caused access violation errors in the File Selector when expanding folders that had results in the separate action but not in the sequence step.
Undo History: Ctrl+A when the undo history list has keyboard focus now selects all items in the undo history instead of selecting the whole contents of the file on the Editor panel.
Windows 8: Toolbar combo boxes did not properly display their drop-down arrows.

PowerGREP 4.3.3 – 30 April 2012

Bug fixes:

Actions that wrote search matches from multiple files to the same target file such as “merge files” actions failed with a “stream read error” (4.3.x only).
Renaming a file in an archive to a name already used by another file in the archive now removes the other file from the archive rather than resulting in two files with the same name in the archive (previous 4.x.x).
Renaming files in archives failed with an “incorrect function error” (4.3.x only). This broke “rename files” actions as well as actions that modified files inside archives and stored backup copies inside the same archives.

PowerGREP 4.3.2 – 5 April 2012

Bug fixes:

Archives: PowerGREP 4.3.0 and 4.3.1 failed to decompress files that were too large to be kept in memory.
Installer: License key was not installed when installing PowerGREP 4.3.0 or 4.3.1 silently.

PowerGREP 4.3.1 – 24 February 2012

Improvements:

Results: Opening a compressed file in an external editor did not add the file’s extension to the name of the temporary file that it is decompressed to (added in 4.2.2 so that editors that look at the file extension see the proper extension; broken in 4.3.0).
Results: PowerGREP now adds an error to the results when it skips password-protected .docx and .pptx files, as it already did for .xlsx files.

Bug fixes:

Preferences|Results: Setting the maximum memory usage to display search results between 2048 MB and 4095 MB caused PowerGREP to claim to have run out of memory when finding the first search match.
Results: PowerGREP sometimes incorrectly handled files that were converted with an IFilter (e.g. Word documents) causing inconsistent search results when repeatedly searching through the same set of files.
View|Office 2003: Switching to or from the Office 2003 display style worked only once during each PowerGREP session (4.3.0 only).

PowerGREP 4.3.0 – 16 February 2012

New features:

64-bit: PowerGREP’s installer now automatically installs a 64-bit version of PowerGREP on 64-bit Windows. This allows PowerGREP to use all of your PC’s available RAM, and allows the IFilter system to be used on 64-bit Windows.
Archives: Disk images of FAT volumes such as floppy disks.
Archives: Files and tarballs compressed with XZ (*.xz) (read and write).
Archives: ZIPX archives using the PPMd and LZMA compression methods used by the latest version of WinZip. PowerGREP will read ZIP and ZIPX archives using the Deflate, PPMd, and LZMA compression methods. PowerGREP will use the Deflate method when creating ZIP files, and the PPMd method when creating ZIPX files. The extensions for the ZIP and ZIPX formats can be configured separately in the preferences.
Preferences, Action: Option to use a certain amount of RAM to keep temporary files in memory instead of writing them to the Temp folder, speeding up actions that use temporary files (such as searching through archives).

Improvements:

Archives: Aborting an action while PowerGREP is decompressing or compressing a large archive now aborts the (de)compression operation cleanly and immediately.
Archives: Do not unzip all files from an archive at once if they are too large to fit into the RAM space for temporary files and the archive is not in a format that uses solid archives.
Dockable panels: New mechanism for docking panels makes it easier to position panels exactly where you want. Instead of moving the mouse pointer to an invisible area next to the edge of another panel, you now move the mouse pointer to icons that appear in the center of the panel that you’re dragging over.
Forum: The button to delete messages is now labeled Cancel for messages that are being edited, to make it more obvious that this button deletes the edited message, but leaves the original message in place.
Results: Show an explanation on the Results panel during the globbing process so new users don’t wonder why the search is stuck at 0% for a long time.
Uninstalling PowerGREP now deletes the conversion cache folder and the temporary files folder.

Bug fixes:

Action: Setting “file sectioning” to anything but “whole file” or “line by line” and then changing “action type” to “simple search” now properly changes the file sectioning to “line by line” instead of using the previously selected option that became unavailable in the interface.
Action: The text cursor in the Replace and Comments boxes did not change to reflect insert and overwrite mode.
Archives: *.tar.bz2 and *.tar.gz files were treated as single compressed files instead of as compressed tar archives when the *.bz2 and *.gz extensions were specified for the single compressed BZip2 and GZip formats (as they are by default).
Archives: Attempting to add a read-only file to an archive resulted in an “access denied” error even though read access is available.
Archives: Zero-length files are not extracted.
Command line: /save parameter failed to save the results unless the file had a .pgr or .pgsr extension.
Editor: Search matches were highlighted incorrectly (highlighting was offset from the actual matches) after a search-and-replace using multiple search terms with “non-overlapping search” turned off.
Editor: Syntax highlighting colors are incorrect when highlighting search matches in a file and different color palettes have been selected for the Editor and the Results.
File Formats: PowerGREP failed to terminate the XLS converter process after certain crashes in the converter, showing an access violation error on the Results panel, and causing errors saying “cannot send file to the converter process” on the following XLS and XLSX files.
File Selector: Marking a folder with a red X and marking a folder inside that folder with a green tick should search through the folder with the green tick. The File Selector panel indicated this correctly, but the actual search did not always go down folders marked with a red X.
File Selector: Right-clicking on an archive and selecting Edit File now opens Windows Explorer with the archive selected instead of opening Windows Explorer at the My Documents folder.
Results: Shift+Ctrl+E does not open the file selected in the Results in EditPad.
Undo manager kept archive files open longer than needed, preventing archives that were created or modified by an action in the undo history from being deleted or modified again unless the action was undone first.

PowerGREP 4.2.4 – 17 October 2011

Bug fixes:

Command line: error messages for invalid backup and target parameters now mention the actual parameter instead of the placeholder %s.
File Formats: Improved decoding of XLS and XLSX files allowing files to be decoded that PowerGREP previously failed to decode.
Results: Closing PowerGREP while it was still updating the results display caused it to crash after closing.
Results: Indentation was lost when results were partially updated (e.g. when results are automatically updated during a search-and-replace showing match and replacement on separate lines with matches grouped per file).
Results: Under certain circumstances PowerGREP would lock up while updating the display of a large set of search results.

PowerGREP 4.2.3 – 26 August 2011

Improvements:

Command line: /file, /fileexclude, /folder, /folderrecurse, and /folderexclude no longer ignore files and folders that do not exist but now mark them in the file selector just as happens when you open a .pgf file that references files or folders that no longer exist. Syntactically invalid paths now cause an error.
Command line: /silent now checks whether the target type specified with the /target parameter is valid for the previously specified action type and shows an error message if it is not.
Command line: Parameters such as /replace that change the action type now imply a /target parameter if the target type specified earlier on the command line is invalid for the new action type, or if no target type is specified and the action type requires one.
Editor: Ctrl+Left Shift and Ctrl+Right Shift toggle the direction of the text to left-to-right or right-to-left when a keyboard for a right-to-left language is installed (though not necessarily active).
Text Layout|Cursors: Cursor shape now has two flag options. One makes the flag indicate the direction of the input language (as in Notepad), the other the direction of the text the cursor is at (as PowerGREP 4 did previously).

Bug fix:

PowerGREP 4.2.2 did not display itself correctly when run via a remote desktop connection.

PowerGREP 4.2.2 – 20 July 2011

New features:

Command line: /file and /fileexclude parameters to mark individual files to be included in or excluded from the action.

Improvements:

File Selector/Results: Move Files and Copy Files commands now preserve the target and backup settings between PowerGREP sessions, including the target and backup location histories.
File Selector: Ignore unquoted spaces before and after each file mask in the Include Files and Exclude Files boxes.
Results: Edit with EditPad command now works with EditPad Lite 7 and EditPad Pro 7. It still works with EditPad Pro 4, 5, and 6, but gives preference to version 7 if you run more than one version.
Results: Increased the timeout for the PDF and XLS converters so larger files can be converted.
Results: Opening a compressed file in an external editor now adds the file’s extension to the name of the temporary file that it is decompressed to so that editors that look at the file extension see the proper extension.
Results: Right-clicking in the results but not on a highlighted match and selecting Edit with EditPad Pro should select the line or block of context in EditPad just like it does with the built-in editor when double-clicking.
Results: Search toolbar should also search through the bottom half of the Results panel with the results details or errors.

Bug fixes:

Action: File name search actions did not properly trap errors when copying and moving files.
Action: Loading an action that uses a very long delimited list of literal text caused PowerGREP to appear to hang if the search type was previously set to regular expression before loading the action.
Action: Search-and-replace actions that modify original files and create backup files failed on zipped documents with an error about being unable to create the backup.
Action: Searching through empty files caused access violation errors to be listed in the results.
Action: Target type “save list of matching files to target files” did not work for the action type “file name search”.
Action: Turning on “filter files” without entering a search term to filter with caused the action to fail with an access violation error instead of showing a helpful message about the blank search text like PowerGREP does for the other parts of the action.
Archive Formats: .gz files that consist of multiple concatenated .gz files are now correctly decompressed as a single file like gunzip does rather than failing with a CRC error.
Creating a portable installation via the Help menu did not copy over PowerGREP4PDF.exe and PowerGREP4XLS.exe which PowerGREP needs to convert PDF and Excel files.
Editor: Replacing or reverting matches in hexadecimal mode failed with an access violation.
File Formats: Improved decoding of XLS and XLSX files allowing files to be decoded that PowerGREP previously failed to decode.
File Selector: Keep the same file or folder selected when the search completes and the File Selector is updated with the results.
Preferences, Results Colors: Double-clicking in the results sample no longer results in an access violation but simply selects the word you double-clicked on.
Regex: ^ and $ matched after and before U+2026 which they shouldn’t, and didn’t match before and after U+0085 which they should (4.x.x only).
Results: Search options did not show tick marks to indicate which ones are active.
Results: Updating results after running an action or loading a .pgr file took far too long when tens of thousands of files needed to be sorted.
Undo manager: Undo manager locked up when PowerGREP added an undoable action that modified files on a drive that could not be monitored for directory changes. This caused PowerGREP itself to also lock up until the undo manager was killed via the task manager.

PowerGREP 4.2.1 – 25 February 2011

New feature:

Editor: Ctrl+] to go to the matching bracket, Ctrl+[ to select between matching brackets, and Ctrl+Shift+] to insert a matching bracket.

Improvements:

Action: Right-click menu for the edit box for headers and footers in collected files.
Print: Text Layout Configuration now lists printer fonts when activated from the print preview and “allow bitmapped fonts” is turned on.
Rich text is no longer placed on the clipboard for selections larger than 1 megabyte.
Toolbar controls now show tooltips when another toolbar control has keyboard focus.

Bug fixes:

Action: Lists of regular expressions that included a regex that consisted of nothing but a comment were not handled correctly; now such regexes are ignored like blank list items.
Action: The (...) button for the target location did not work when the target type was set to “path placeholders”.
Action: The mode modifiers (?i) and (?-i) were ignored in regular expressions that (aside from the mode modifier) consits entirely of literal text.
Action: Using the “line by line” sectioning and “invert search results” caused an AV when used with the “simple search” action type.
Copying the hexadecimal representation of bytes and pasting them as text now works correctly for bytes >= 0x80.
File Formats: Non-ASCII characters in WordPerfect documents were either mixed up or missing in PowerGREP’s text conversion; now PowerGREP supports all 14 WordPerfect character sets supported by WordPerfect X5.
Keyboard: On keyboards that use the AltGr key, pressing AltGr and E, F, N, O, P, or S did nothing.
Preferences, Text Encoding: ASCII+&htmlchar; encoding now correctly inserts and replaces non-ASCII characters in target files.
Preferences, Text Encoding: If “detect HTML charset meta tag” was on and the file did not actually contain a meta tag, PowerGREP always detected UTF-8 and UTF-16 files without a BOM as well as ASCII files using Unicode escapes, even if those two options were turned off.
Preferences, Text Encoding: The “ASCII + NCR” encodings did not work correctly with small files that fit into memory entirely, causing the NCR references to remain untranslated.
Preferences, Text Encoding: VIQR encoding no longer crashes on files that contain bytes > 126 (which never occur in a proper VIQR file).
Preferences, Text Layout: Setting “add X pixels of extra space between lines” to a non-zero value sometimes caused part of the text to be positioned incorrectly.
Rich text copied by PowerGREP can now be pasted in Outlook Express.

PowerGREP 4.2.0 – 12 January 2011

New features:

Action Type: File name search: Search through the names of files instead of their contents (like rename files but without a replacement text).
Command line: /folderexclude parameter to mark folders to be excluded from the action, complementing the existing /folder and /folderrecurse parameters.
Command line: /searchtextfile and /searchbytesfile parameters to load a delimited list of search terms from a file, similar to grep -f.
Path placeholders: %FILENAMENOGZ% is the same as %FILENAMENOEXT% if the file has a .gz or .bz2 extension, or the same as %FILENAME% if it does not have such an extension.
Preferences, Action: Option to ingore the read-only flag on files.
Preferences, Editor: Add detailed automatic folding points from the file navigation scheme.
Sequence: Check All and Uncheck All commands in the right-click menu to activate or deactivate all the steps in the sequence.
View, Lock Toolbars: Prevent moving the toolbars by accident.

Improvements:

Action: %MATCHTERMN%, %MATCHFILETERMN% and %MATCHSECTIONTERMN% are now supported in the search term too.
Action: Backreferences in replacement text that refer to capturing groups that do not exist are now highlighted as errors.
Action: Turning on “match whole sections only” now automatically turns on “collect/replace whole sections” to make it obvious that matching whole sections causes them to be collected and replaced as a whole as well.
File Selector/Results: Exploring a file’s folder now selects the file in Windows Explorer.
Sequence: If multiple actions in the sequence modify the same file, create only one backup copy of that file. This allows “single” backup options to work correctly with sequences and avoids needless backups of intermediate steps with “multiple” backup options.
Undo History: Undo items for sequences store the file selection if the sequence has steps that use the File Selector instead of their own file selection, so the Use Action or Sequence item can restore the file selection to the File Selector.

Bug fixes:

Action: Action date, file date, and file size placeholder values were off by one.
Action: Backreferences in regular expressions to named capturing groups that were carried over from other parts of the action were highlighted as errors even though they worked correctly.
Action: Execute and Quick toolbar buttons did not always show the correct caption after starting PowerGREP or after restoring a saved layout.
Action: Grouping unique matches failed to group all the occurrences of the first match that was found.
Action: History menu for the filter files part of the action was not assigned, causing an access violation error when clicking the triangle button.
Action: Literal text searches using placeholders in the search term did not work correctly if the search was not case sensitive.
Action: Placeholders did not work when used in a regular expression.
Action: Renaming a file that only changed its case caused the file to be renamed or moved into its backup location instead of being renamed; if backups were disabled, nothing happened.
Action: Splitting files using a regular expression did not correctly split binary files. Some bytes 0x80 and above were replaced with question marks in the target files.
Action: The read-only attribute on existing target files was ignored, causing files to be overwritten anyway when the option to make backups is turned on, and causing PowerGREP to silently fail to make replacements in read-only files when the option to make backups is turned off.
Command line: /save result.pgsr saved only the results of the last step in the sequence instead of the results of the entire sequence.
File Selector: Compound file formats like CHM files could not be excluded using the Exclude Files file masks.
File Selector: Refreshing the file selection (automatically or on command) did not update files or folders that were renamed to the same name with a change in case only.
Preferences, Syntax Colors: Changes in syntax coloring file masks lost their effect when restarting PowerGREP unless the preferences screen was OK’d again.
Results, Print: The last bit of text was missing from the printout.
Sequence: If a step bases its file selection on another step, changing the number of the other step did not update that number in the list of steps, even though the step was correctly updated in the actual sequence.
Undo History: Errors caused by invalid archives should not cause the undo manager to stop working.

PowerGREP 4.1.3 – 23 September 2010

Improvements:

File Formats: Excel files are now decoded using a separate process so that PowerGREP doesn’t crash when the XLS decoder crashes.
File Formats: PDF files are now decoded using a separate process so that multiple PDF files can be decoded in parallel when PowerGREP is configured to use more than one thread for grepping.
Results, Editor: Ctrl+F uses the word under the cursor as the default search term.
Results, Export: RTF file format support.
Windows 7: Show progress meter on the taskbar button.

Bug fixes:

Action: Backreferences using the placeholder syntax %GROUP1% were always highlighted as errors in regular expressions even though they worked correctly.
Action: Ctrl+P and Ctrl+Shift+P shortcuts for inserting path and match placeholders had no effect.
Action: Literal text search terms that had multiple placeholders and literal text between two placeholders ignored the text between the placeholders.
File Selector: Using double quotes to keep file names with commas and semicolons together did not work in PowerGREP 4 as it did in PowerGREP 3.
Preferences, Editor: Setting the backup type to “no backups” made it impossible to overwrite files using the Save or Save As items in the Editor menu.
Results: PowerGREP 4.1.2 sometimes crashed while building the results.
Results: PowerGREP became unresponsive for extended periods of time while executing actions that require identical matches to be grouped and grouping the matches found in a file takes longer than finding the matches in a file. This can happen when there is a large number of unique matches in the overall search but only a small number of matches in each file.
Results: Updating match results now works when the action is paused.

PowerGREP 4.1.2 – 12 August 2010

Improvements:

Archives: Improved handling of errors caused by invalid archives.
File Formats: New decoder for Microsoft Excel that supports the XLS and XLSX formats and should be more reliable than the old decoder.
Library: Ctrl+F, F3 and Shift+F3 can now be used to search through the library.
PowerGREP can now use up to 4 GB of memory per instance on 64-bit versions of Windows. Previously this was 2 GB.
Preferences, Text Encoding: HTML meta tag check for determining the file’s encoding now supports the new HTML5 charset meta tag.
Results: Aborting an action now takes no longer than 10 seconds. Any threads still busy 10 seconds after clicking the abort button are killed.
Vista & 7: PowerGREP now correctly scales itself when the font size has been increased by more than 125% (i.e. the display resolution is set to more than 120 DPI).

Bug fixes:

Action: Changing the search type between “delimited” and “list” caused an internal inconsistency in the action definition which sometimes caused errors when attempting to save or execute the action (since version 4.1.0 which splits up or recomposes the delimited search terms).
Action: Displaying extra context after matches did not work when using sections as context.
Action: Filtering out files did not work in version 4.1.1. All files were searched..
Archives: Zipped documents were skipped if the folder containing them wasn’t previously globbed and the IFilter option was turned off.
Editor: Editing a file with highlighted search matches caused the matches to be shifted incorrectly (4.1.1 only).
Editor: Making replacements using backreferences via the Search toolbar on the Editor panel failed with an AV.
File Formats: PowerGREP now correctly searches plain text files that have a .wri extension or are otherwise configured to be read as a Microsoft Write files.
File Selector, Search Only through Files with Results never searched through any files.
File Selector: Importing file listings ignored UNC paths with spaces in the server or share name.
Preferences were not loaded when silently executing an action from the command line.
Results: Clearing the results while the results display is being updated releases the results without clearing the results display, causing errors when trying to click on the results.

PowerGREP 4.1.1 – 8 July 2010

New feature:

Command line: /nocache parameter that can be used on combination with /silent to temporarily disable the conversion cache. Files in proprietary formats will be reconverted even if they were cached before, and won’t be added to the cache. The conversion manager will not be used.

New examples in the help file:

Put anchors around URLs that are not already inside a tag or anchor.
Rename files based on HTML title tags. Shows how you can use the rename files “action type” with the “filter files” feature to use part of a file’s contents to rename a file.
Sequence to update files from 2010 to 2011: copy files under a new name, then search-and-replace the targets.

Improvements:

IFilters are now always called from PowerGREP’s main thread. Some IFilters do not always work correctly unless they’re called from the application’s main thread. This includes the Office 2007 IFilters, causing Office 2007 files to be skipped as binary files if the option to use the IFilter is turned on.
Preferences, File Formats: Setting the maximum size of the conversion cache while PowerGREP is running to zero now completely disables the PowerGREP conversion manager.
Preferences, File Formats: The default IFilter options now has “decode binary files” turned on and “only use IFilter for” set to *.ppt so that PowerPoint files will be searched using the IFilter.
Results: Threads that become unresponsive are no longer forcibly terminated after one minute. While this feature (introduced in PowerGREP 4.0.0) was intended to make PowerGREP more reliable by making sure it doesn’t lock up if it gets stuck on a particular file, it seems to have actually made PowerGREP less stable. Threads that are forcibly terminated cannot clean up after themselves.
Uninstaller now cleans up the settings stored in %APPDATA%\JGsoft\PowerGREP 4.

Bug fixes:

Action, Extra processing: Group placeholders that specified placeholder options such as %GROUP1:L% did not work correctly.
Action: Collecting search matches into target files with “group identical matches” turned on resulted in a double BOM being written if the target file was a Unicode file configured to have a BOM.
Action: Creating target files using path placeholders failed for the second and following files if the target folder did not yet exist.
Action: List only sections matching all terms did not work correctly.
Action: Setting “order of collected matches” to sort the files in a particular way when collecting search matches into a single target file caused PowerGREP to fail to write anything to the target file.
Action: Using the Preview or Rename (but not not Quick Rename) buttons to run a “rename files” action caused PowerGREP to leak 64K of memory for each file that needed to be renamed.
Command line: When using the /silent parameter to execute an action that is set to not create backup copies when overwriting files PowerGREP 4.1.0 crashed after completing the action unless the /noundo parameter was also used. Now /noundo is implied when the action does not create backups.
File Selector: Including or excluding files did not work correctly when using more than one traditional file mask and a file mask containing a backslash was listed before another file mask not containing a backslash.
File Selector: The Path box ignored UNC paths with spaces in the server or share name.
PowerGREP is now more conservative with memory when searching through very large files. Previously this was based on available memory. Now there is a fixed 50 MB limit. This makes sure PowerGREP doesn’t run out of memory when multiple threads open multiple very large files at the same time.
Results: Storing the results of a search-and-replace or search-and-delete action is much too slow when collecting context.
Text copied to the clipboard by PowerGREP 4.1.0 could not be pasted into applications that support rich text if the copied text did not have any changes in syntax coloring.

PowerGREP 4.1.0 – 14 May 2010

New features:

Command line: /context parameter to specify whether to use sections or lines as context, or no context at all.
Command line: /contextextra parameter to specify extra context before and after.
Command line: /noundo parameter to skip saving the undo history even when backup files are created.
Command line: /noundomanager parameter to save the undo history directly to a file without using the undo manager.
Command line: /reuse parameter to reuse a previous PowerGREP instance, if there is one, and if it isn’t busy.
Copying text to the clipboard now includes an additional rich text clipboard format that preserves PowerGREP’s syntax coloring and match highlighting when pasted into a rich text editor or word processor.
Preferences, Editor: Option to allow next/previous match commands to advance to the next/previous file.

Improvements:

Action: Changing the search type from “delimited” to “list” or back splits up or recomposes the delimited search terms.
Command line: When using the /silent parameter PowerGREP no longer adds the action to the undo history if the action is set to not create backup copies when overwriting files. Previously, all actions that create or overwrite files were added.
File Selector: Tooltip for folders now indicate the total size of the files in the folder in addition to the number of files in the folder.
Preferences, File Selector: The default permanent exclusion mask (on new PowerGREP installs) is now the regex \.bak\d*$;\.~[^.]*$;^Backup [0-9]+ of;^Working copy of which better matches the names of backup files created by PowerGREP. A file or folder simply called “backup” is no longer excluded by default.
Results, Export: Allow any encoding supported by PowerGREP to be chosen.
Results: Check memory usage while a file is being processed rather than only when PowerGREP is done with a file to prevent out of memory errors if a single file has more matches than PowerGREP can display.
Results: Display a detailed error message for out of memory exceptions (when PowerGREP really runs out of memory unexpectedly rather than hitting the memory usage limit set in the preferences).
Results: Pressing Enter when the cursor is over a file name or a match opens the file in the default editor, just like double-clicking does.
The keyboard shortcut for Redo was changed to Ctrl+Y to be more in line with other Windows applications; the old Ctrl+R keyboard shortcut still works.

New examples in the help file:

Extra processing on the whole target file rather than on individual search matches.
Split and merge log files by date.

Bug fixes:

Action: Executing a search-and-replace or search-and-delete action with the “collect/replace whole sections” option turned on failed with an access violation error. Preview and Quick Execute did work correctly.
Action: Search histories (black triangle above boxes for search terms) did not persist when closing and restarting PowerGREP.
Action: The “copy all searched files” target type caused the action to fail if no replacements were made in some of the searched files.
Action: The “copy modified files” and “copy all searched files” target types failed if a zipped document such as a DOCX or XLSX file was marked (green tick) directly in the File Selector.
Action: Using Quick Execute for “split files” actions or “collect files” actions using “path placeholders” for “target file creation” caused matches to be written without delimiters regardless of the “between collected text” setting if “order of collected matches” was set to “no particular order”.
Archive: PowerGREP failed to open gzip archives that include the file name of the original file.
Editor: Next/Previous File did not move through the files in the order they have on the Results panel and did not skip files without matches when those aren’t being shown on the Results panel.
File Selector: Files and folders tree did not adjust itself to the width of the File Selector panel when the file masks and time settings were hidden.
File Selector: The Path box ignored UNC paths with characters other than letters, digits, or dollar signs in the server or share name.
Results, Clear: Clearing the results did not clear the bottom area with errors or match details.
Results/Editor: F3 keyboard shortcuts for quick searches on the Results and Editor panels were not handled correctly or at all depending on which part of PowerGREP had keyboard focus.
Results: Replacements were not displayed for matches that spanned multiple lines or blocks of context when showing matches with context, in original order, separating match and replacement.

PowerGREP 4.0.6 – 23 March 2010

Bug fixes:

Action: Executing an action using the “list files” action type and the “save results into a single file” target type caused the action to fail with an access violation error after all files were found. PowerGREP failed to save the list of files into the target file.
Archives: Actions that searched through files in an archive and modified some of the files it searched through caused the files that were searched through but not modified to be damaged in the archive.
Creating a portable installation via the item in the Help menu did not copy over the required file 7z.dll.
File Selector: PowerGREP hung when expanding drives that do not support ReadDirectoryChangesW such as drives created by ExpanDrive.
Incremental search on the Results and Editor search bars did not properly reset its origin when moving the cursor.

PowerGREP 4.0.5 – 9 March 2010

Bug fixes:

Archives: PowerGREP did not search through archives that are inside folders inside other archives unless those folders inside those archives were previously expanded in the File Selector.
File Selector: Importing a file listing that included the root of a drive caused PowerGREP to lock up.
IFilter: The option “use IFilter to decode the compound document into plain text” (archive formats preferences) caused compound documents for which an IFilter is available to be treated as binary files by PowerGREP if the option “decode binary files using IFilter” (file formats preferences) was turned off. Now the option “decode binary files using IFilter” is ignored for compound documents.
IFilter: The second time PowerGREP checked whether an IFilter is available for a particular file type that doesn’t have an IFilter an error “string list does not allow duplicates” occurred (4.0.4 only).

PowerGREP 3.5.8 – 9 March 2010

Bug fix:

Archives: PowerGREP did not search through archives that are inside folders inside other archives unless those folders inside those archives were previously expanded in the File Selector

PowerGREP 4.0.4 – 2 March 2010

Improvements:

Archives are now created after the grepping process for most actions so each archive is written at most once. This saves time and allows newly created 7-zip archives to be solid. It does increase memory and temporary file usage.
Literal line breaks in regular expressions (inserted by pressing Enter, as opposed to typing \r\n) now match a line break in any style (Windows, UNIX, or Mac) rather than only a Windows-style line break.

Bug fixes:

Action: Check All and Uncheck All items in the context menu of lists of search terms did not correctly select or deselect the search terms even though they correctly updated the checkboxes.
Action: Search-and-replace and search-and-delete actions did not skip files read through an IFilter. Such files should be skipped as the IFilter system is read-only.
Action: Search-and-replace using a (delimited) list of search terms with “non-overlapping search” turned off failed with an access violation if one of the search terms did not find any matches.
Editor, Save As: Saving a huge file under a new name correctly saved the file but corrupted PowerGREP’s view of the file if parts of the file after the first insertion or deletion in the file were swapped out to disk when saving.
File masks with multiple adjacent spaces matched only a single space for each block of spaces in the file mask.
File Selector: Folder totals were not indicated after executing an action.
Preferences, Editor: Selecting a different text layout had no effect.
Preferences, Editor: The list of file navigation schemes wasn’t properly cleared causing schemes to be listed repeatedly and triggering “index out of bounds” errors when selecting a duplicate.
Results: Double-clicking a (green) highlighted replacement opened the source file instead of the target file if a non-overlapping search caused the replacement to be made after another match was already replaced further down in the file.
Undo: If an action renamed a file adding or removing a .bz2 or .gz extension thus compressing or decompressing the file then undoing that action renamed the file back without undoing the compression or decompression.

PowerGREP 3.5.7 – 2 March 2010

Improvement:

Literal line breaks in regular expressions (inserted by pressing Enter, as opposed to typing \r\n) now match a line break in any style (Windows, UNIX, or Mac) rather than only a Windows-style line break.

Bug fix:

Editor, Save As: Saving a huge file under a new name correctly saved the file but corrupted PowerGREP’s view of the file if parts of the file after the first insertion or deletion in the file were swapped out to disk when saving.

PowerGREP 4.0.3 – 18 February 2010

Bug fixes:

Action: Regular expressions in the form of (?:a|bb(?:cc))d failed to compile.
Action: The “nothing” choice for “between collected text” wasn’t saved into PowerGREP Action files, causing it to revert to “line break” when loading the action.

PowerGREP 4.0.2 – 12 February 2010

Bug fixes:

Preferences, File Selector: Remembering the names of the File Selection and Action files last opened caused PowerGREP to crash at startup if it was closed with no .pga file loaded on the Action panel.
Sequence: Changing or deleting a step of which the results were still being shown on the Results or Editor panels caused PowerGREP to crash.

PowerGREP 3.5.6 – 12 February 2010

Improvements:

File Selector: Updating the list of included/excluded files when typing into the File Selector panel is no longer slowed down by folders containing lots of files, if those folders are collapsed.
Help|Upgrade Now allows you to purchase a major upgrade without having to look up your user ID.

Bug fixes:

Action: Using placeholders mixed with literal text with the search type set to literal text caused PowerGREP to mangle the literal text.
Conversion manager: Portable installations of PowerGREP defaulted the conversion cache folder to the Windows temp folder instead of a folder on the portable device.
File Selector: Turning off “same masks for all folders” did not disable the file mask controls when a folder that was not marked to be included in the search was selected, causing errors when changing file mask settings for such a folder.
Match placeholders: %MATCH% and %GROUP1% were replaced with nothing instead of the matched text when using file sectioning.
Preferences, Operation: The default backup type was not used when starting PowerGREP and the option to remember the last used action was turned off.
RegexBuddy: Right-clicking on the Section Search box to invoke RegexBuddy with “file sectioning” set to “search for sections” and the sectioning search type set to “list of regular expressions” caused an access violation error.
Undo Manager: Executing an action from the command line with the /quit parameter sometimes caused the undo manager to crash if the action only needed a very short time (seconds or less) to execute.
Windows 98/ME: PowerGREP Failed to save the state of its toolbars and panels.

PowerGREP 4.0.1 – 11 February 2010

Improvement:

Library: The sample library is now loaded automatically the first time you run PowerGREP 4.

Bug fixes:

Assistant: Popup hint for the “folders and files” tree also appeared in the Assistant if the tree was clicked on.
Beta version timeout of 1 March 2010 was not removed from the final release.
Forum: Clicking on a header in the list of conversations or messages before connecting to the forum caused a harmless access violation error.
Forum: F1 key did not show the forum reference.

PowerGREP 4.0.0 – 9 February 2010

PowerGREP 4 is a major upgrade and comes with a very long list of new features and improvements. Per our upgrade policy this major upgrade comes with an upgrade fee for anyone who purchased PowerGREP before 9 February 2009. The page for buying the upgrade lists the most important new features and enhancements. The version history you’re looking at now shows everything that has changed.

New features:

Action Type: Delete search matches. Though this can be achieved with a search-and-replace with a blank replacement text, “delete search matches” is more convenient when using a delimited list of search terms, so there’s no need to append a search pair delimiter to each search term.
Action Type: Merge files: Like a collect data action, but saves the entire file rather than just search matches. Can be used without a search text. Can be used with a replacement text to determine the target file.
Action Type: Quick Search: Like Display Search Matches, but with far fewer options to simplify the user interface
Action Type: Rename Files. Search and replace through file names rather than through file contents. Renaming files allows you to automatically zip or unzip files by renaming file.ext to archive.zip::file.ext or vice versa. By filtering files based on their contents using a regular expression with a named capturing group, you can use text from the file in the file’s name by using a backreference to the named capturing group from the filter.
Action Type: Split Files: Works like a collect data action that always collects the entire search match (or the entire section if that option is used). Instead of the text to be collected, the “replacement text” is the path to the file where the match or section should be saved.
Action: Backup destination type “subfolder of original folder” that puts the backup file in a subfolder of the folder containing the file being overwritten.
Action: Collect data action type now has the option to only list files matching all search terms
Action: Collect data target type: path placeholders. This differs from the “save one file for each searched file” target type + “path placeholders” target destination combination in that the “path placeholders” target type can combine text collected from several files into a single file if the path placeholders resolve to the same target file for multiple source files, while “save one file for each searched file” would overwrite that file repeatedly, collecting only text from the last file searched.
Action: Collect data: Specify headers and footers to be collected for each input file and/or each output file; specify different text to be inserted between matches from the same file and matches from different files. These settings replace the “delimiter for collected items” setting, which is now “nothing”, “line break”, or “same text between all collected text” for the “between “collected text” setting.
Action: Copy and paste items under the downward pointing arrow button above the Search box to copy the entire search term or list of search terms, along with any replacement text.
Action: Delete duplicates option for the delete search matches action type to delete only the second and following matches of each search term, or te delete only duplicate matches (comparing the matched text). Matches that turn out not to be duplicates are shown in the results as being replaced with themselves.
Action: Display search matches action type now has the ability to create target files. Though this can be achieved with a “collect data” action with a blank text to be collected, “display search matches” is more convenient when using a delimited list of search terms, so there’s no need to append a search pair delimiter to each search term.
Action: Filter files to halt processing on files that (don’t) match one or more search terms or grab various parts of a file to use in the regular expression or replacement text via named capture.
Action: List Files now has an option to save a list of full paths, relative paths, or file names only into the target file.
Action: Lists: Check All and Uncheck All commands in the right-click menu for the checkboxes in lists of search terms.
Action: Lists: Cut, copy, and paste commands for search terms in a list of search terms to cut/copy/paste the label, search term, and replacement text (if any) all at once.
Action: Paste Escaped context menu item to paste the text on the clipboard with any regular expression metacharacters in it automatically escaped.
Archives: 7-zip (read and write)
Archives: ARJ (read only)
Archives: CAB files (Microsoft cabinet) (read only)
Archives: CD and DVD disk images using the ISO and UDF file systems (read only)
Archives: DEB packages (read only)
Archives: Files compressed with GZip (*.gz) and BZip2 (*.bz2) (read and write)
Archives: LHA and LZH (read only)
Archives: RAR (read only)
Archives: RPM packages (read only)
Archives: TAR files, including .tgz, .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 (read and write)
Archives: WIM files (Windows Imaging) (read only)
Assistant: Right-click on the assistant or use the General section in the Preferences to choose whether the assistant displays the hint for the control the mouse is pointing to or the control that has keyboard focus. When the mouse is over the assistant, it always displays the control that has keyboard focus.
Assistant: Right-click on the assistant to select a different font or font size. Can also be set in the General section in the Preferences.
Command line parameter to mark a single file for searching, so PowerGREP can be added to the right-click menu of files as well as folders.
Command line parameter to run PowerGREP silently.
Context: Context can be configured independently from file sectioning. E.g. when sections are very large, you can choose to show just one line of context for each match, instead of the whole section. To get PowerGREP 3’s results, set the “context type” to “use sections for context”.
Context: Context type that does not show any kind of context; speeds up the search and reduces memory consumption for searches with large numbers of matches. Use this option when you want to see matches in the results, but don’t want to see any context information.
Context: Expand to whole lines option that displays lines with line numbers as context, regardless of the context or sectioning type.
Context: Fixed record length. This context type is particularly useful for binary files. Set the length to the number of bytes your hex editor displays on a single row to get the same view in the results in PowerGREP.
Context: Show extra context before and/or after the match. You can specify how many extra lines, sections, or context blocks depending on the context type and whether context is expanded to whole lines.
Editor: Code folding, manual and automatic based on indentation or file navigation scheme.
Editor: Make All Replacements and Revert All Replacements to process all replacements in the file at once.
Editor: Make and revert replacements by double-clicking on highlighted matches.
Editor: Next/Previous File buttons that jump to the next file with search results, using the sort order as used in the results.
Editor: Search toolbar for searching through the open file.
File Formats: *.kmz extension is now part of the default file mask for the “zipped documents” archive format. A .kmz file is a compressed .kml file used by applications such as Google Earth.
File Formats: CHM (read only archive format).
File Formats: Office 2007 files (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.) can now be processed as text instead of as XML by turning on the IFilter option for “zipped documents” in the Archive Formats preferences.
File Formats: Option to use IFilter to convert files in proprietary formats to text using the same method as the search functionality built into Windows.
File Formats: Text in PowerPoint (*.ppt) slides can now be searched through by using the IFilter.
File Formats: Unicode characters in MS Word documents can now be read correctly by turning on the IFilter option for *.doc files.
File Formats: When a proprietary format is configured to be decoded, you can now choose whether a file that fails conversion should be skipped or should be searched as binary data.
File Selector: Copy or move the selected files, files with matches, or files without matches to a different folder or .zip archive.
File Selector: Delete files.
File Selector: Exclude files with search results.
File Selector: Hovering the mouse pointer over a file displays additional information such as the file’s size and last modification date.
File Selector: Import File List to get a list of files from arbitrary text files to include or exclude those files from the action. The import command can be saved as part of the file selection so it will be repeated each time the action is executed.
File Selector: Limit the search to files with a file size in a certain range.
File Selector: Network can now be marked to search all network servers listed in the File Selector. If no network servers are listed at all, PowerGREP will scan the network when executing the action.
File Selector: Network servers can now be marked to search all (visible) shares on the server.
File Selector: Show Folders menu item and button to show only folders in the File Selector, to make it easier to work with folders containing very large numbers of files. If Search Archives is on, archives are shown too, as PowerGREP treats those as compressed folders.
Forum
Library: Store file selections and sequences.
Library: Store search terms without a complete action. These can be added and used via the black drop-down arrow next to the Search labels on the Action panel.
Placeholders: %MATCHCOUNT%: Number of occurrences of each match when grouping identical matches.
Placeholders: Basic arithmetic on numeric placeholders; e.g. %MATCHNZ:*2+10% numbers matches 10, 12, 14, 16, etc. Also works on placeholders like %MATCH% that normally hold text rather than numbers, but only when their text can be converted into a number.
Placeholders: Date and time. Right-click on the Search box on the Action panel and select Match Placeholders for a list.
Placeholders: File size. Right-click on the Search box on the Action panel and select Match Placeholders for a list.
Placeholders: Insert match placeholders by picking them from a list and easily set padding, case, and arithmetic options.
Placeholders: Number of the match counted separately for each search term when the search type is a list. %MATCHTERMN%, %MATCHFILETERMN%, and %MATCHSECTIONTERMN% count matches for the overall action, per file, and per section separately for each search term. They correspond with %MATCHN%, %MATCHFILEN%, and %MATCHSECTIONN% which count matches for all search terms combined.
Preferences, Action: Configure the folder PowerGREP uses for temporary files, instead of the system temp folder. Set this to use a drive that’s faster than the drive Windows is installed on, or to make sure not to leave any traces on that drive.
Preferences, Action: Option to use a separate search thread for each disk drive so all disks are searched at the same time, even if the number of disks exceeds the number of CPU cores.
Preferences, Action: Option to use a separate search thread for each network server so all servers are searched at the same time, even if the number of servers exceeds the number of CPU cores.
Preferences, Action: Specify how many search threads to use, up to the number of CPU cores in the PC.
Preferences, Editor: Backup option not to create backups.
Preferences, Editor: Fully configurable backup setting, including destination folders, etc.
Preferences, Editor: Option to make the Next/Previous Match/File buttons on the Editor panel select the same match or file on the Results panel.
Preferences, External Editors: %LINESTOP% and %COLSTOP% command line placeholders that indicate the end of the match.
Preferences, External Editors: (...) buttons to browse for an executable and a working folder.
Preferences, External Editors: Option to show Open All Files command for an external editor if all files in the results match the extensions supported by the editor.
Preferences, File Selector: Separate masks for files and for folders to exclude them from all actions.
Preferences, General: Add or remove the “Search with PowerGREP” items in the right-click menu for folders in Windows Explorer.
Preferences, General: Send To menu item for PowerGREP, allowing both files and folders to be marked for searching.
Preferences, Results: Highlight matches produced by different search terms in different colors (dubbed fountain colors).
Preferences: Paragraph symbols have been replaced with line break indicators that indicate the type of line break (CRLF, LF, etc.). They are also affected by syntax highlighting now.
Preferences: Text layout choices for the action, results and file editors: complex (bidirectional editing using Uniscribe), left to right (like PowerGREP 3), forced monospaced, and forced monospaced ideographs. Allow a proportionally spaced font to be selected in any case.
Results/Editor: Back and forward mouse buttons now move to the previous or next match in the results.
Results: Align matches with context display option that displays matches with context, and indents each line so all the matches line up vertically. Use this option in combination with sorting matches alphabetically to get a concordance display. The matches will only line up correctly when turning of word wrap and using a monospaced layout for the results (configurable in the preferences).
Results: Bookmark files or matches in the results.
Results: Delete selected files or files that were found to have or not to have matches during the last PowerGREP action.
Results: Fold menu items to fold or unfold the results of one file or all files.
Results: Group search matches per unique match, then per unique file (i.e. get a list of files per search match).
Results: Include file in or Exclude file from the next action.
Results: Locate in File Selector command to select the file the cursor points at in the File Selector.
Results: Make and revert replacements directly on the Results pane, without using the editor.
Results: Next/Previous File buttons for quickly jumping between files in the results.
Results: Next/Previous Match buttons, just like in the Editor, can be made visible on the toolbar via the small arrow at the right hand edge on the toolbar.m
Results: Pause button to temporarily pause an action. The results (so far) of paused actions can be inspected. Paused actions can then be resumed or aborted.
Results: Search toolbar for searching through the text of the results.
Results: Second and following lines of multi-line matches and context are now lined up with the first line when showing context numbers.
Results: Sort files in order searched through. PowerGREP 3 searched files in alphabetical order, so there was no need for an option to show the files in the order searched through, as the A..Z option already covered that. PowerGREP 4 searches through multiple drives and files concurrently, which causes files to be added to the results in a non-deterministic order. If you sort files in the order they are searched through, new search results are always added to the top or bottom. If you sort files alphabetically, new search results are mixed with old results to maintain alphabetic order, just as it happens when sorting files by number of matches or by last modification date.
Results: Target file names only display option. Only available for rename, collect data, and search-and-replace actions. Displays a list of target files that were created.
Right-to-left language support.
Sequence: Perform any number and any kind of PowerGREP actions in sequence. Each action can be restricted to files that matched, or did not match, in one of the previous actions.
Text Encoding: EUC-JP, EUC-KR, EUC-CN, EUC-TW.
Text Encoding: ISO 2022.
View: Save custom layouts.

Improvements:

Action: Lists: Ctrl+Click on the Add button to add a duplicate of the selected search term, instead of adding a blank search term.
Action: When changing the search type to a list, start with a list with the current regular expression rather than an empty list.
Archives: ZIP archives containing files larger than 4 GB (64-bit ZIP files).
Clicking on a panel’s tab or caption bar now activates the first or main control on that panel.
Command line parameters for target, backup, and results options can now be specified as strings instead of integers.
Editor: Closing a file without saving and then opening again now shows the file without the changes to highlighting made to the unsaved Make and Revert Replacement commands.
Editor: Make Replacement and Revert Replacement now immediately update the match on the Results display.
Editor: Make Replacement and Revert Replacement now make/revert all replacements inside the selected text if there is a selection, rather than just the one under the cursor.
Editor: Undoing and redoing Make and Revert Replacement now also updates the highlighting as the commands themselves do.
Editor: When the editor needs to close a file because it will be overwritten by the action, the prompt now shows Pause and Abort buttons to pause or abort the action, instead of the Cancel button (which aborted the action). Save and Don’t Save buttons are still available.
File Formats: Google Adwords Editor *.aea and *.aes extensions are now part of the default file mask for the “zipped documents” archive format
File Formats: The *.epub extension is now part of the default file mask for the “zipped documents” archive format.
File Selector: If no files or folders are marked in the tree of files and folders, but some files or folders are selected, automatically mark those files when executing the action instead of complaining that no files are marked. The files and folders that were marked automatically are also unmarked automatically when the action completes. This way you can easily select some files to search through them without having to use the system of marking and unmarking files and folders.
File Selector: Long lists of file extensions are now processed almost as fast as a single extension, resulting in a noticeable speed increase when globbing tens of thousands of files against a dozen or more extensions. The file extensions applied to each file aren’t just the Include Files and Exclude Files settings in the File Selector, but also the file masks used in the Encoding, File Formats, and Archive Formats preferences.
File Selector: Path box should not try to resolve network paths until both the server and share name have been typed in, and should not repeatedly try to resolve shares that can’t be found. This prevents unnecessary delays, as Windows takes a long time to determine that a network share does not exist.
File Selector: Select multiple files at once, so they can all be marked with one button click.
File Selector: Support Unicode file names.
File Selector: The *folder\* file mask syntax for selecting all files in a particular folder now also works with archives.
Results/Editor: Highlight the active line even when the edit boxes don’t have keyboard focus.
Results: Attempting to write the same target file twice in a single action that does not combine targets is now be treated as an error instead of overwriting the file.
Results: Display the number of unique matches in each file for quick collect actions that group identical matches.
Results: Dynamic limit of the maximum number of matches that can be displayed, based on actual memory usage, rather than a fixed limit of 100,000 matches. The memory limit can be configured in the Results Preferences.
Results: Opening results in an external editor should select context or a line if that’s what was clicked on in the results, similar to what happens when double-clicking the results to open the editor.
Results: Print selection checkbox in the print preview is now enabled if you select part of the results before clicking the Print button.
Results: When collecting data from files in proprietary formats with the option to collect one results file for each file searched through, append a .txt extension to the target file name. E.g. save somefile.pdf.txt instead of somefile.pdf so the user doesn’t end up with a plain text file with a .pdf extension.
Stop PowerGREP from locking up when something goes wrong with a particular file by killing off unresponsive worker threads after one minute, and list the file that the thread locked up on among the errors on the Results panel.