Grep stands for "Get Regular Expression and Print" and is a text searching tool that was first developed for unix systems and has been ported to most operating systems.

This PM version of grep is designed as a user friendly application. It is designed for a multitasking environment and the search takes place on a separate thread to minimize the time that the wait icon is displayed. It will also run in a low priority idle mode to reduce the impact the search has on the other active programs.

The often cryptic command line options have been replaced with easy to use menu selections. The output of the search is sent to a PM window and the user has easy access to all of the information that was found by the program.

To reduce the overhead, the results are buffered until the search is completed and then written to the results window. To indicate that the search is still active, the small icon at the left of the title bar will change color as an activity indicator. The color change depends on the search results, so it does not change at a fixed rate.

This version of grep does not support the full set of "regular expressions" that most of the command line versions of grep support. It does support two wild-card characters. The '*' character represents multiple characters and the character '?' represents one character. Thus a search pattern of "h*e" would match both "house" and "horse". A search pattern of "ho?se" would also match both words. The wildcard action of the '*' character is not limited to a single character or word, it can represent multiple words. The limit in the search is that the search pattern must found in a single line. The program reads one line at a time from the source file, with a line being terminated by a newline character or characters.