Java Grep Library

I'm not aware of a sophisticated grep librarystrong text, but you are right: it's not hard to write. I suggest a combination of commons-io and String.matches(someRegex):

public class Grep extends DirectoryWalker
{
    public Grep(){
        super();
    }

    public List clean(File startDirectory){
      List results = new ArrayList();
      walk(startDirectory, results);
      return results;
    }

    protected boolean handleDirectory(File directory,
                                      int depth, Collection results){
      // Decide if a (sub) directory will be handled for recursive search
      return true;
    }

    protected void handleFile(File file, int depth, Collection results)
    {
        LineIterator it = FileUtils.lineIterator(file, "UTF-8");
        try{
            while (it.hasNext()){
                String line = it.nextLine();
                if(line.matches("myRegEx")){
                    results.add(file);
                }
            }
         }
         finally {LineIterator.closeQuietly(it);}
    }
}

---

Update Marco pointed out Unix4j which is a quite interesting library which emulates the unix pipelining | with Java method chaining. grep is supported as well as cat, cd, cut, echo, find, grep, head, ls, sed, sort, tail, uniq, wc, barges.

yep. Grep4j - a grep lib for Unix environments, and you can also grep remotely easy : http://code.google.com/p/grep4j/

Unix4j also implements a (pure java) grep command: http://www.unix4j.org

Unix4j.fromStrings("1:A", "2:B", "3:AB", "4:AC", "5:ABC").toFile("myFile.txt");
Unix4j.fromFile("myFile.txt").grep("AB").toStdOut();

>>>
3:AB 
5:ABC

Disclosure: I am one of the contributors to the unix4j project.