Wine-Staging 5.14 Release In 2020 Finally Implementing... Findstr

Incredibly it has taken until now with Wine-Staging 5.14 to implement more than just a stub to Wine's FINDSTR program implementation. Yes, the long-standing command to search for strings.

Up until now the Wine Findstr stub has just always returned zero as do most stubbed out functions for Wine. In the case of Findstr, its Windows behavior is inverted in returning 0 to signify a match or 1 for no match. So regardless of what is being fed to Wine's Findstr stub, it has always returned a "match". But now in Wine-Staging 5.14 is finally a minimal implementation of Findstr to actually handle string searching behavior.

Wine's Findstr stub has been problematic for at least some software and outlined in this 7 year old bug report about the Freemake Video Converter installer running into problems with the Findstr stub.

In that bug report, a minimal implementation of Findstr saw patches evolve in the past few days based on Wine's find.exe code. Findstr does support a number of options but all of that behavior isn't in place for Wine yet.

Thus for now this Findstr code is in Wine-Staging as of this morning's 5.14 release while seeing that it works and doesn't regress any existing Wine support that was relying upon the prior Findstr stub that just always returned match.

The improved Findstr is the main change of Wine-Staging 5.14, which is coming in at just over 630 patches atop upstream Wine. Both Wine and Wine-Staging binaries for popular distributions can be downloaded from WineHQ.org.