Tools to search for strings inside files without indexing

Question

I have to change some connection strings in an incredibly old legacy application  and the programmers who made it thought it would be a great idea to plaster the entire app with connection strings all over the place   Visual Studio s  current project  search is incredible slow  and I don t trust Windows Search   So  what s the best free  non-indexed text search tool out there  All it should do is return a list with files that contain the wanted string inside a folder and its subfolders    I m running Windows 2003 Server

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I m a fan of the Find-In-Files dialog in Notepad    Bonus  It s free

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I m a fan of the Find-In-Files dialog in Notepad    Bonus  It s free

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If you don t want to install Non-Microsoft tools  please download STRINGS EXE from Microsoft Sysinternals and make a procedure like this one    echo off if   1        goto NOPARAM if   2        goto NOPARAM if not exist  1 goto NOFOLDER  echo ------------------------------------------ echo -  1   folder echo -  2   string to be searched in the folder echo - PLEASE WAIT FOR THE RESULTS     strings -s  1     findstr  i  2  gt  grep txt notepad exe grep txt  goto END   NOPARAM rem - input command not correct echo                                      echo Usage of GREP CMD  echo   Grep  SearchFolder  SearchString echo Please specify all parameters echo                                      goto END   NOFOLDER echo Folder  1 does not exist goto END   END rem - exit

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I like AstroGrep  The results are shown in a list  A click on a row shows you the whole line as a preview highlighting the hit   It seems to be quite fast  lean and it is free   Tested on Windows 7  8  10 and Windows Server 2008 R2  Allows regular expressions        AstroGrep is a Microsoft Windows GUI File Searching  grep  utility  Its features include regular expressions  versatile printing options  stores most recent used paths and has a  context  feature which is very nice for looking at source code   Reference  AstroGrep

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Visual Studio s search in folders is by far the fastest I ve found    I believe it intelligently searches only text  non-binary  files  and subsequent searches in the same folder are extremely fast  unlike with the other tools  likely the text files fit in the windows disk cache     VS2010 on a regular hard drive  no SSD  takes 1 minute to search a 20GB folder with 26k files  source code and binaries mixed up  15k files are searched - the rest are likely skipped due to being binary files  Subsequent searches in the same folder are on the order of seconds  until stuff gets evicted form the cache     The next closest I ve found for the same folder was grepWin  Around 3 minutes  I excluded files larger than 2000KB  default   The  Include binary files  setting seems to do nothing in terms of speeding up the search  it looks like binary files are still touched  bug    but they don t show up in the search results  Subsequent searches all take the same 3 minutes - can t take advantage of hard drive cache  If I restrict to files smaller than 200k  the initial search is 2 5min and subsequent searches are on the order of seconds  about as fast as VS - in the cache   Agent Ransack and FileSeek are both very slow on that folder  around 20min  due to searching through everything  including giant multi-gigabyte binary files  They search at about 10-20MB per second according to Resource Monitor    UPDATE  Agent Ransack can be set to search files of certain sizes  and using the  lt 200KB cutoff it s 1 15min for a fresh search and 5s for subsequent searches  Faster than grepWin and as fast as VS overall  It s actually pretty nice if you want to keep several searches in tabs and you don t want to pollute the VS recently searched folders list  and you want to keep the ability to search binaries  which VS doesn t seem to wanna do  Agent Ransack also creates an explorer context menu entry  so it s easy to launch from a folder  Same as grepWin but nicer UI and faster   My new search setup is Agent Ransack for contents and Everything for file names  awesome tool  instant results

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I m a fan of the Find-In-Files dialog in Notepad    Bonus  It s free

User · Answer

Original Answer  Windows Grep does this really well   Edit  Windows Grep is no longer being maintained or made available by the developer  An alternate download link is here  Windows Grep - alternate  Current Answer  Visual Studio Code has excellent search and replace capabilities across files  It is extremely fast  supports regex and live preview before replacement

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If you don t want to install Non-Microsoft tools  please download STRINGS EXE from Microsoft Sysinternals and make a procedure like this one    echo off if   1        goto NOPARAM if   2        goto NOPARAM if not exist  1 goto NOFOLDER  echo ------------------------------------------ echo -  1   folder echo -  2   string to be searched in the folder echo - PLEASE WAIT FOR THE RESULTS     strings -s  1     findstr  i  2  gt  grep txt notepad exe grep txt  goto END   NOPARAM rem - input command not correct echo                                      echo Usage of GREP CMD  echo   Grep  SearchFolder  SearchString echo Please specify all parameters echo                                      goto END   NOFOLDER echo Folder  1 does not exist goto END   END rem - exit

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There is also a Windows built-in program called findstr exe with which you can search within files    gt findstr  s  provider sqloledb    cs

User · Answer

Original Answer  Windows Grep does this really well   Edit  Windows Grep is no longer being maintained or made available by the developer  An alternate download link is here  Windows Grep - alternate  Current Answer  Visual Studio Code has excellent search and replace capabilities across files  It is extremely fast  supports regex and live preview before replacement

User · Answer

Visual Studio s search in folders is by far the fastest I ve found    I believe it intelligently searches only text  non-binary  files  and subsequent searches in the same folder are extremely fast  unlike with the other tools  likely the text files fit in the windows disk cache     VS2010 on a regular hard drive  no SSD  takes 1 minute to search a 20GB folder with 26k files  source code and binaries mixed up  15k files are searched - the rest are likely skipped due to being binary files  Subsequent searches in the same folder are on the order of seconds  until stuff gets evicted form the cache     The next closest I ve found for the same folder was grepWin  Around 3 minutes  I excluded files larger than 2000KB  default   The  Include binary files  setting seems to do nothing in terms of speeding up the search  it looks like binary files are still touched  bug    but they don t show up in the search results  Subsequent searches all take the same 3 minutes - can t take advantage of hard drive cache  If I restrict to files smaller than 200k  the initial search is 2 5min and subsequent searches are on the order of seconds  about as fast as VS - in the cache   Agent Ransack and FileSeek are both very slow on that folder  around 20min  due to searching through everything  including giant multi-gigabyte binary files  They search at about 10-20MB per second according to Resource Monitor    UPDATE  Agent Ransack can be set to search files of certain sizes  and using the  lt 200KB cutoff it s 1 15min for a fresh search and 5s for subsequent searches  Faster than grepWin and as fast as VS overall  It s actually pretty nice if you want to keep several searches in tabs and you don t want to pollute the VS recently searched folders list  and you want to keep the ability to search binaries  which VS doesn t seem to wanna do  Agent Ransack also creates an explorer context menu entry  so it s easy to launch from a folder  Same as grepWin but nicer UI and faster   My new search setup is Agent Ransack for contents and Everything for file names  awesome tool  instant results

User · Answer

I m a fan of the Find-In-Files dialog in Notepad    Bonus  It s free

User · Answer

Original Answer  Windows Grep does this really well   Edit  Windows Grep is no longer being maintained or made available by the developer  An alternate download link is here  Windows Grep - alternate  Current Answer  Visual Studio Code has excellent search and replace capabilities across files  It is extremely fast  supports regex and live preview before replacement

User · Answer

There is also a Windows built-in program called findstr exe with which you can search within files    gt findstr  s  provider sqloledb    cs

User · Answer

Original Answer  Windows Grep does this really well   Edit  Windows Grep is no longer being maintained or made available by the developer  An alternate download link is here  Windows Grep - alternate  Current Answer  Visual Studio Code has excellent search and replace capabilities across files  It is extremely fast  supports regex and live preview before replacement

User · Answer

I like AstroGrep  The results are shown in a list  A click on a row shows you the whole line as a preview highlighting the hit   It seems to be quite fast  lean and it is free   Tested on Windows 7  8  10 and Windows Server 2008 R2  Allows regular expressions        AstroGrep is a Microsoft Windows GUI File Searching  grep  utility  Its features include regular expressions  versatile printing options  stores most recent used paths and has a  context  feature which is very nice for looking at source code   Reference  AstroGrep

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