Tool to recursively search all files in a directory for a string [duplicate]

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.

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

There is also a Windows built-in program called findstr.exe with which you can search within files.

>findstr /s "provider=sqloledb" *.cs

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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