Finding a file in a hard drive without knowing name, only contents?

Question

I need to search a hard drive for a file, but I don't know the name of the file. I only know that the file contains a list of email addresses. (I don't know which email addresses are on the file, I just know that there is a list of email addresses) The file is not necessarily a Word or .txt document. Is there any way that I can find this file? Thanks for the help!

(I have a Windows computer)

Answer 1

You can use grep for windows (in that answer there are several download options - https://superuser.com/a/301075/321990).

An example command that will match (it will search for a regex match recursively from where it's executed): grep -r -E ".+\@.+\..+" *

The file matched contains this:
ariel@gmail.com
ariel@hello.com
lalala@kuku.com
pipi
nana
anilopo$a8

It will print you the 3 email lines, near the file name. It will look like this:
new/yo.txt:ariel@gmail.com
Where yo.txt is the file containing the strings above, and located under 'new' folder

If you only want the filenames, you can add the -l parameter to grep:
grep -l -r -E ".+\@.+\..+" *
And it will only print:
new/yo.txt

The regular expression I've used is very simple, and likely to find more things, cause it's not accurate. You can search the web for a better regular expression to check email addresses, and change ".+\@.+\..+" with what you've found.

Hope it helps!