1 Erk.  Is this a solicitation for advice, or just a rant? 

Windows search is one of the most spectacularly useless things in the entire OS, right up there with "diagnose network problem." 

2 I use wingrep (wingrep.com) for this kind of thing. I'm not certain it supports kanji searches, but it should give you what you're looking for.

3 OK, I'll give WinGrep a try!

4 Well, it works, but man is that a clumsy interface. Anyone got anything better?

5 Cygwin runs a unix shell on top of windows, gives you all the commands you'd expect.

Notepad++, as well as being an excellent mutli-doc editor, has a 'search in files' function that is very robust.

Both of these are GPL freeware...and *should* be unicode-aware.  (I've never had to search for kanji, so I can't speak to that)

HTH.

6 Real grep (also awk, diff, tar, etc) is available as part of the gnuwin32 packages. Searching for kanji works with these tools, but the standard cmd.exe window has display and encoding issues. One workaround is to put the kanji you're searching for into a file and then pass that to grep with the -f option.

(this is not like the pseudo-Unix Cygwin environment; they're just standard Windows command-line tools in a normal shell, which is much easier on the brain)

-j

7

JGreely(this wrote:

Unless the enemy has studied his Agrippa...which...no, wait, wrong context.  If one has already climbed the learning curve of cryptic commands and sh behavior, it's easier.  All about the tool that works best for the user!

8

JGreely wrote:

(this is not like the pseudo-Unix Cygwin environment; they're just standard Windows command-line tools in a normal shell, which is much easier on the brain)

Unless the enemy has studied his Agrippa...which...no, wait, wrong context.  If one has already climbed the learning curve of cryptic commands and sh behavior, it's easier.  All about the tool that works best for the user!

Also, PIMF.  *sighs*

9 When someone says "this is a job for grep!", it's safe to assume Knowledge Of The Hidden Mysteries.

Also, Cygwin is equal parts evil and suck, and has no place on a modern Windows box.

-j

10

At Tektronix, I started using Unix in 1978, on a PDP-11/45. We were running what was known as "V7", which means version 1.7. This was the era in which saying "Berkeley mods" to another user of Unix resulted in a knowing nod. (And yeah, we installed Berkeley mods.)

When I lived in Boston, late 1980's, my internet provider was "Software Tool and Die", and what they ran was Unix. You purchased the right to access their system and use it.

I also used Unix on Sun 3 workstations about 1985 when I worked at BBN.

Don't lecture me about Hidden Mysteries; I was doing them likely before you were born. (Damned kids.)

Anyway, a lot of my objections to WinGrep was the awfulness of using its menus to find the directory. When I posted that I hadn't noticed that they tossed in a right-click menu choice, which drastically improves the usability. It does what I need it to do, so I think I'll stick with it.

11 To the extent that I would have trouble with the Hidden Mysteries these days it would mostly be due to brain decay. I just don't think as well now as I once did.

12 "Hidden Mysteries"?

13

If we told you, we'd have to kill you.

14 Windows has an equivalent to grep built in, findstr. findstr /i "string" *.as /i is "ignore case" and there are a bunch of other parameters. If you want to search for a string, you use /c:"search these words", or else it will search for any of search, these, or words.

15 Rick, how much you want to bet it only works on file extensions that Microsoft knows are text?

16 well, I don't know what I did wrong, but it just hung. No CPU usage, no response, no nothing until I hit Control-C. I rate that one a fail. Anyway, WinGrep already solved the problem, so I don't need any more suggestions.

17

"Rick, how much you want to bet it only works on file extensions that Microsoft knows are text?"

Nothing at all--I literally use it all the time.  It's entirely unrelated to Windows Search, so it doesn't have that limitation.

It's NOT a grep clone, however--the syntax is different, and it won't give you a nice progress bar or anything, so if it's scanning thousands of files, or a large amount of data or whatever, it will certainly APPEAR to hang.

 

18 It was in a directory with only ten files, and the CPU use meter showed 2%, which is what it shows when the system is idle.

19

I bet it was waiting for input. I didn't specify any file names, and I bet it was waiting for STDIN.

But I don't really care enough to do any more experimenting with it.

20

Aziz wrote to tell me that you can add file extensions to the list of those that indexing processes:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/add-a-new-file-type-to-indexing-in-windows-vista/

21 But be warned: as soon as you do it, the indexing service kicks in and indexes all of your hard drives -- and the damned window can't be minimized. (I've got it mostly slid off the screen just to get it out of the way, and I suspect I'll have to leave my computer turned on all night.)

22 10^100 Desktop is often effective.  The downside is obvious.I'll check out findstr, with thanks.

23

Steven, yeah, if you didn't specify any file names, it was waiting for a list of them on stdin, which IIRC is the same thing grep does.  Glad you found a workable solution.

 

24

Just thought I'd mention: this morning Security Essentials informed me that I was infected with an adware package called "Win32/Opencandy". I think that it might have been a hidden gift from when I installed WinGrep yesterday afternoon.

25

Actually, it looks like it was MediaInfo that did that. I told Security Essentials to do a full scan, which took about three hours.

MediaInfo still seems to work, which is nice.

26 Yeah, I installed MIRC (IRC client) the other day and got warning about the same thing.  IIRC it was a low risk item.