Tool to recursively search all files in a directory for a string

Question

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Tools to search for strings inside files without indexing

Before I make one, any good tools out there for free/cheap that will recurse through all files in a directory and search for a text string in them? Need to find an instance of a string in any configuration files laying around.

Kind of like a Windows Search "find files that contain..." on steroids?

Oops - This is pretty much a duplicate question, sorry, didn't find the other one before

Answer 1

I use total commander. It has a search in string function for all files in a directory tree.

Answer 2

Are you using a Unix variant? Because that's precisely what grep does. If you're using Windows, you can get it here

Answer 3

If you're on *nix, you can always use grep for in-file searching.

Answer 4

C:\>find /?
Searches for a text string in a file or files.

FIND [/V] [/C] [/N] [/I] [/OFF[LINE]] "string" [[drive:][path]filename[ ...]]

  /V         Displays all lines NOT containing the specified string.
  /C         Displays only the count of lines containing the string.
  /N         Displays line numbers with the displayed lines.
  /I         Ignores the case of characters when searching for the string.
  /OFF[LINE] Do not skip files with offline attribute set.
  "string"   Specifies the text string to find.
  [drive:][path]filename
             Specifies a file or files to search.

If a path is not specified, FIND searches the text typed at the prompt
or piped from another command.

Answer 5

Windows Grep is quite good. http://www.wingrep.com/

Answer 6

IF you are on Windows, you can still use unix tools. http://www.cygwin.com/ will install something that looks like the command prompt in windows but it has a huge host of unix utils.

cd ~/cygdrive/c/
grep -ir "the string" *