Best way to *confidently* search files and contents in Windows without using an indexing service?

Question

Back in Windows XP I knew that doing a file search and checking "Search file contents" (or whatever it was) I would get my results if I waited patiently.

In Vista, I felt I had absolutely no confidence that what I had typed had been thoroughly searched for, even with all the "Search non-indexed locations" etc. checked.

In Windows 7 I feel better and usually find stuff, but am suspicious when I don't. I'm not left feeling "confident".

I don't want (the weight of) Google Desktop.

I want a solid, brute file search utility. I found one I thought looked good recently (installed Windows 7 RTM last week and can't remember what it was called) but it still didn't seem to find files I placed as tests.

Answer 1

Agent Ransack is excellent -- it's fast, lightweight (single <1 MB application), powerful (regular expression matching of file names and content), and you can trust the results.

Answer 2

You also have a perfectly good copy of PowerShell sitting there on your Windows 7 install:

Get-ChildItem C:\* -Recurse | Select-String 'foo'

You could even add an alias to your profile for Select-String called grep and then do:

ls C:\* -r | grep 'foo'

Answer 3

I always use the find-in-files feature of Notepad++ for my brute-force searches.

Answer 4

Try using grep from GnuWin32. GnuWin32 has Windows implementations for most of the common Unix command-line facilities.

Answer 5

There is a pretty brute-force way using findstr:

findstr /s "some search string" *

You can even use regular expressions with the /r switch.

Answer 6

Try using Everything, which aims to provide instant search across all Windows systems.

Answer 7

Not many people are aware of Total Commander's advanced file search capabilities. This search can find files using wildcards, search for text within the files, read into most archives, search by file attributes and so on.

Answer 8

You should have a look at Wikipedia's list, List of search engines, Desktop search engines. Ultimately, you're asking for our opinions, but if ours doesn't match up with yours, then you won't use the program. I would try a few on that list and see if you like them.

One popular engine is Agent Ransack (personal favourite) or Copernic Desktop Search (it has free and paid versions, and is Windows only).

Answer 9

I use cygwin. Here's what works for me:

cd /cygdrive/c
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep "search string here"

Answer 10

While I'm a great fan of Total Commander, the speed of Everything is just unrivaled.

If you're looking for a content search tool without risking your privacy, have a look at DocSearch, a small yet very efficient Java utility.

Answer 11

Unix grep implementation for Windows by the famous Tortoise svn developers:

grepWin

Shell integration, comprehensive GUI, and free.

Answer 12

FileSeek is pretty sweet too. Allows for more things than you can do with free version of Agent Ransack and is very fast.

Answer 13

There is a free tool to tag your files by author, item, time etc. It provides a web form to search by tags and content calling automatically Vista search function (see link text and its help section)