Thanks in advance!
Yes, I realize this is a sort of “weird” question. ;-)
The grep utility has been around for 50+ years. Get a better OS.
I use Agent Ransack by MythicSoft, a free download that lets you search for content words/phrases, file type, date range, title, etc.:
https://download.cnet.com/agent-ransack/3000-2072_4-10043846.html
https://astrogrep.sourceforge.net/
The author Diana Gabaldon [Outlander series] uses it.
If you were an astronaut you wouldn’t have this problem. That is because you would be using Linux, since Windows won’t open on a space station. :)
Bfl
Google the string "powershell grep".
I had an old program I used to search and replace text or strings of text in multiple files and it was highly useful for me back in my coding days. To date the program, yes it could search inside Lotus123 Docs. 🤣
It was freeware. Problem is this was 20+ years ago but the program was called Inforapid Search & Replace. It’s not been updated but maybe someone can give a clue to something more modern that does similar tasks.
https://www.inforapid.de/html/searchreplace.htm
Pardon me for chiming in. I know this is a tangential answer to your question and will not help you, but every Mac Finder window has a “Search” box in the upper right corner. No add-ons needed — it’s built right into MacOS.
You can search for 150 different attributes including content of files. The files are automatically indexed with “Spotlight” and searches are almost instantaneous. You can restrict searches to specific folders or subfolders or top-level to search your entire drive.
I use this feature frequently in financial planning and review. I store all our bank and credit card statements by year in a “Personal Finance” folder. I can search all of our records for a merchant, a date, an amount, etc to locate the statement. If I need to find a purchase for $982.36, I search for that and get the info instantly.
It’s an amazing feature of Mac.
Files are missing?
I suspect Nargles.
I use “Notepad++” to search txt, html, aspx, etc. not sure if it’ll pick it up in doc, docs, or not. But it’s free and worth trying. Has a “find in files” feature.
Notepad++ will do what you’re looking for.
Search notepad++ download.
If you have Java installed then DocFetcher is a good lightweight utility. It will do what you want after you set the folders to be indexed.
https://docfetcher.sourceforge.io/en/index.html
But the greatest of them all is Recoll. It’s the graphical front end for the Xapian indexing engine. Looking at the download page I see that he asks for a small donation for the Windows build (5 EU) but if you cannot afford it or cannot use Paypal he will give you a download link for free. It is by far the best indexer out there.
To quickly locate certain files, you can use the quicksearch filter (CTRL+S) to show only the files containing specific characters. You can toggle the filtering by pressing CTRL+S again. The behavior can be configured in the options, e.g. you can specify if the filename must begin with the typed letters, or if they can appear anywhere in the name.
