Windows 7: How to view/split/extract or convert very large .reg files?

Question

On Windows 7 x64 SP1 Home Prem

Have very large .reg files (over 400MB) that were created by exporting from Regedit. Files too large even for Notepad++.

Need a way to extract or view portions of the files. These are historical snapshots of the registry, so re-creating them isn't possible.

The ideal would be a tool that can display it like RegEdit but without changing the actual registry.

Or, a way to split them into smaller .reg files that Notepad++ can read.

Or, a way to convert the .reg files to HIVE format, since I do have ways to extract from large HIVE files.

I'm so desperate I'll even go for a Cmd line tool to grope my way through, but these are unicode files so even FINDSTR won't work. I've tried using MORE cmd (yes I'm THAT desperate) but it would take days.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

For command line tools, use type to handle Unicode in combination with findstr.

So do something like this:

type myfile.txt | findstr "what I want to find"

Or, consider grepWin, which has a slew of options to search a file on Windows. - http://stefanstools.sourceforge.net/grepWin.html