How do I search for text within files?

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I am talking specifically of the files on my USB drive. I want to be able to search files for specific words.

What's your OS?

I'm getting a windows 10 computer , but currently have windows 7.

Open a Windows Explorer page for the root directory of the USB device.

Type the text you want to search for in the "Search Quick access" box (upper-right corner).

Press the 'Enter' key.

Wait for the results to populate.

...

You may have to repeat this process for every folder and sub-folder on the USB device.

For more powerful search within files, try the free software Notepad++.

I'm not super familiar with 7+, but I believe after that, you have to click another option that shows up underneath, to search for text within files. I just found it the other day at work.

I know with Windows XP, you had to hack the registry to get it to search ALL files. Otherwise it would only search "known" filetypes, even if you had them set up to open with WordPad (for example). I don't know if they ever "fixed" that.

CTRL + F

Well this seems to work. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/win ... e303b4bec9

Grep is a very powerful unix tool for this. I am sure you can find a unix emulator that would be able to run it on Windows.

Or use Find which is included in all versions of windows...

browse to your usb drive in windows 7
hold shift and right click on an empty bit of window and select open command window here
in the black box that appears type powershell and press enter
enter this:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Select-String -Pattern 'text to find'