Best File search? with no database?

[stilly]

I have never had to do this before on my comp, but are there any GOOD file searching programs that do not rely on a database?

OR, if there IS a database based FS program that is good for winblows 7, care to share?

And in case I am not able to come back here- please feel free to answer the question anyways. - For the good of mankind and thank you for your input.

[GovGeek]

I used to use X1 on Win7. Without an index, I don't know how you'd expect a program to perform well.

Sent from my pocket computer via Tapatalk

[ocabj]

find

[stilly]

FIND NOT!

IT seems to take FOREVER! And it FAILED at finding things. I am looking for a NON database because I do not want a 3GB+ database taking up my space that I could be storing quality porn-err e-books in...

I have 850GB of space spread across 4 drives, C,D,E,F and I am looking for PDFs or EXCEL files that are invoices. Sadly I have about 4+ generations of windows on this machine so I feel like I am hunting a needle in a haystack. I only have about 7GB of free space across all of the drives which is why I do not want to make a database.

[Redneck Geek]

If you just want locations, try Notepad++ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/

I use it all the time. It's relatively fast because you can lock down what and where to look. File type+location<+keyword>=faster. Use the 'Find in file' off the menu and it'll list where it hits.

[ocabj]

FIND NOT!

IT seems to take FOREVER! And it FAILED at finding things. I am looking for a NON database because I do not want a 3GB+ database taking up my space that I could be storing quality porn-err e-books in...

I have 850GB of space spread across 4 drives, C,D,E,F and I am looking for PDFs or EXCEL files that are invoices. Sadly I have about 4+ generations of windows on this machine so I feel like I am hunting a needle in a haystack. I only have about 7GB of free space across all of the drives which is why I do not want to make a database.

find . -type f -name "*.pdf"

I ran: time find / -type f -name "*.pdf" on my desktop and it completed in:

real 7m28.320s
user 0m9.244s
sys 2m10.778s

Found every single PDF on a 500GB SSD, 1TB plater, and I accidentally walked a 500GB USB2 and 1TB USB3 drive that was attached as well. Ran kind of long because it also searched through 10 years of locally archived email I have in my home dir.

There are Windows ports for 'find'. Probably best to just install cygwin so you get grep and other *nix style utilities.

Or if you just want to reinvent the wheel, you could write a perl or php script to recursively walk a directory.

[Axonic]

An other good working tool for searching your data on Windows is Lookeen Free. I'm using it for years without any problems and it's totally free.

[the86d]

Open a CLI session by typing "cmd" in the search box on the start menu, and hit enter.

If you only have one drive, and the '\' starts at the root, but alternatively you could do a 'cd \' 1st, but this is simpler and works from any local directory on the drive in question:
dir \*[oneword]*.* /s
Substitute [oneword] for a single word you are searching for.

If you want to search another drive, and say it is the E: drive:
E:
dir \*[oneword]*.* /s
Substitute [oneword] for a single word you are searching for.

Multi-word example:
dir \*minimum*wage*.* /s