Searching Text Files in Windows Vista

Blarghy

So, I need to search through about 20k plain .txt files looking for a specific string: $SKIN (all uppercase, with the dollar sign). Normally, when I need to do this, I just use the built in Windows search tool (we still use Vista at my workplace) and just filter out the false positives. Alas, the built in search tool apparently ignores symbols like $ and case sensitivity, resulting in matching on anything that has any variation of "skin" in it, which in this case is still nearly 10k files (and the subset that actually only use $SKIN is probably a dozen or less).

I've messed around with various search terms like adding quotes, but Windows seems determined to ignore the $ sign and case sensitivity though. So, does anyone have any suggestions about how I can do this search? Whether by some option in Windows, or through some freeware program?

Thanks!

hsu

find
findstr

Both of those Windows commands will do what you want.

BlindZenDriver

hsu tells the truth :-)

A lot can be done with files using the windows command line and just the build commands that comes with the operating system (back before Windows that was what we had and in the beginning Windows was just a user interface on top of those commands).

A tip to when using such commands is that the output the give on the screen, like say a list of files, can be redirected to a file really easily. All you do is write the command and it's parameters as normal and add >filename and that will then result in a file with the output being created in the current folder. An example

DIR C:\ /S >C:\ListAllFiles.txt

This will make a list of all files on the C-drive and put that list in the root of the C-drive. Note that this list will also include the ListAllFiles.txt as it is created right away an thus is a file on the C-drive (Also note that files marked as hidden aren't included in the list).

olanmills

I've used this in the past:

http://www.baremetalsoft.com/baregrep/

It's really fast.