Windows xp search inside files for text

AstroGrep can also search Word files, which is a handy feature. You can also save or print out all of the results for future reference. I also find their interface to be more modern and pleasing to the eye. BareGrep is a fairly simple search program that supports regular expressions and all the basic search functions.

This program has some serious features and a serious price tag to go along with it. I only recommend this program if you have some serious search needs that include finding text in Word files, PDF documents, Excel spreadsheets, etc. It can even extract statistics from your log files and give that information to you.

One runs in the normal command prompt and the other uses PowerShell. Both are quite powerful and can find pretty much anything you are looking for. The first command is findstr. You can read the reference document here to learn how to use findstr. As you can see, there are quite a few options.

Obviously, this is a lot more complicated than using one of the programs above. And you can also provide which directory it should be searching in and also if it should go through all subdirectories. The only problem is, that the Windows search only searches within files of certain types listed here.

It might not find what you are looking for. If you want to do it programmatically, you can use the Search API , although I am not sure if it has the same limititations. If it does you probably will have to open every file you come across and check the contents with a regular expression.

It will search internally in everything you ask it to, which can take a long time, and come up with false positives too depending on the complexity. For me it was better than all the misses from other tools. There has not been anything that i could not search for, no mater where it was or how it was.

I use Wingrep , a port of the Linux tool. It works nicely and gives you the line number and file name. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Asked 10 years, 3 months ago.

Active 9 years, 6 months ago. Viewed 10k times. Improve this question. Gaff Jack Jack. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Create a free website or blog at WordPress. Perry Stathopoulos. Getting Windows to Search within. SQL files. You can do this for any other file type as well.

Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Dude, that is great!