Please recommend a tool for searching folders, drives, files, etc. Just a simple utility to get the job done reliably, regular expressions are a plus. Windows search has become even more useless lately. It can't find shit that's obviously there.
Google desktop maybe?
nah, that was my thought at first too but I want to be able to search specific folders without them necessarily being indexed. I installed Total Commander which does a decent job. However there is a folder of nearly 100,000 of bad email files I need to search through and everything barfs on it though I haven't let Total Commander work on it for more than a few minutes with the screen frozen up.
I wish more utilities took into account that someone might want to search or view a large number of files. Windows Explorer for example is shit for viewing a folder with a large number of files and forget about it over the network, completely freezing up. Why the fuck not a progress bar and stop button?
Anyways, for the large folder I may just throw new files into sql server on a regular basis and then perform necessary searches in there. Where the fuck is WinFS when you need it.
use dir /s in dos.
Also, I'm sure you can download a dos grep utility.