utility to display contents of multiple short text files in single scrollable column

Question

Is there a Windows utility that will allow you to search against a large collection of small text files, and display not just a list of the found files, but the contents of all matching files in a single scrollable column, with lines separating each matching file, the results being sortable by different criteria?

Answer 1

If you borrow Unix utilities (e.g. by installing any of Cygwin, GnuWin32, unxutils etc) then you can probably achieve that with a combination of grep and cat

 cat `grep -l target *.txt | sort {options}`

or maybe

 grep -l target *.txt | sort {options} | xargs -n 1 cat blanklines.txt

You can probably do it using Windows Powershell.