Tools to search for strings inside files without i

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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

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

Answer 2

You could install cygwin (takes some time) and use grep -R .

Answer 3

FileSeek. It's fast and it's free. It can find text strings, or match regular expressions.

Answer 4

I'd recommend GOW over cygwin, as it's much lighter, but still includes grep as well as another 130 or so *nix command-line utils in 18MB instead of >100MB.

Answer 5

If you are looking for a console based utility to do that then you can refer to this url and create one for yourself.

http://www.dotnetlogic.net/articles/search-for-filename-or-text-inside-other-files-in-directory-using-c/

what is does is find the list of search text in folder and return file matching with same name also returns if some file contains the text also