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I have quite a few movie subtitle files, and sometimes I want to locate a word or phrase that I think might be in there somewhere.

I'm using Windows XP. The "file explorer" has a "search" facility that looks as if it should work, but it doesn't. Possibly because I have Microsoft's "Indexing Service" disabled, but I don't want to change that.

Is there any suitable freeware program I can use to search for text? Ideally I'd like to be able to include, for example, punctuation marks in my search strings, and specify multiple file extensions to be searched.

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5 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

grepWin is a free, powerful tool.

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That one does it for me, thanks! – FumbleFingers Aug 17 '11 at 20:15
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up vote 3 down vote

Agent Ransack is an amazing file search utility, Free and super fast.

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up vote 0 down vote

Perhaps you can use the command line command, start a console and type : 

dir /b /s | findstr /C:"text"

This command will do a "dir" and redirect the output to findstr command.

EDIT: Sorry, this command only will search on file names. If you want to search "inside" the file you can use the finstr command but specifying the file to "read".

Other solution is install the microsoft search engine or google desktop, those tools index different file formats (PDF, DOC, EXCEL, HTML , e-mails ... )

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Thanks, but I was hoping to avoid having to get bogged down with the commandline interpreter. Also it would probably be restrictive on search characters, and I don't think I could specify multiple file extensions to be searched. – FumbleFingers Aug 17 '11 at 17:52
This is only a fast solution for search text on files, you can complex it using a batch script on windows. For example, a simple "for" would be: for %A in (*.txt *.log) do echo %A & find /I /N "Hello" %A – Fernando Rosado Aug 18 '11 at 12:41
If I needed to go that far I think I'd just write my own utility. Anyway, I've already installed winGrep per @orip's suggestion, and it seems fine for what I want, but thanks all the same. – FumbleFingers Aug 18 '11 at 15:19
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up vote 0 down vote

You might also try DocFetcher or Mo-Search if you want indexed search. Mo-Search should work well. It allows filename filtering, although I don't believe it allows more than one filename filter/file extension at a time.

If speed isn't as much of an issue, go with Agent Ransack.

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Thanks for that. grepWin is fine for my particular task so far, but I'll bear these in mind if things become more demanding. I tried Agent Ransack after @Toby posted - it's also fine, but I can't see what it does better than winGrep (for my needs so far, anyway). – FumbleFingers Oct 7 '11 at 23:43
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It is hard to find anything free that is worth much anymore. Spyware and adware have really made their mark. I would recommend FileSearchEX for this task.

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