Tools to search for strings inside files without i

Question

Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.

Closed 4 years ago.

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.

Answer 1

Agent Ransack is another good one. It's fast, free and has some other nice features like shell integration.

Answer 2

I tend to always use grep or find from unxutils. This works great on ms-windows.

Answer 3

SeekFast is very convenient to search text in files - text files, MS Word, Excel, OpenOffice and others. It has a free version.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

I'm a big fan of grepWin. It's free, lightweight and available from the explorer shell. I like not having to deliberately go find and start a program in order to search for something. I can just right click in explorer and bring it up.