You don’t have to use the command line to take advantage of grep and regular expressions. Several text editors offer built-in find functions that harness the same (or similar) regular expressions. These include Smultron (free), Nisus Writer Express ($60), and Bare Bones’ BBEdit and Text Wrangler ($179 and $49). Even Microsoft Word ($399 with Microsoft Office Standard Edition) includes its own variety of regular expressions.
Here are two articles that will show you more:
• “Word Productivity,” March 2004: Use Word’s regular expressions to do complex search and replace commands in a flash.
• “Transform HTML with Regular Expressions,” February 2004: Learn the basics of regular expressions and drastically simplify your HTML editing in BBEdit.