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.

VS "current project" search is INCREDIBLY 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.

Oh, yeah, this is on Windows 2003 Server.

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

TextPad is really good for this sort of thing. You can use it for free, but you get a warning message asking you to buy it. Other than that it is an excellent tool all round.

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

Windows Grep does this really well.

Answer 6

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

Answer 7

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.