windows xp searcher

On Windows XP, I have set an AT job to run this command daily in C:\

dir /s /b * > dirlist.txt

This lists the full path of all files on the C drive. Then whenever I need to find a file, I can use findstr. This beats using Windows Explorer Search since it allows regular expression matching on the entire path. For example:

findstr ".jpg" dirlist.txt
findstr /i /r "windows.*system32.*png$" dirlist.txt

This is a very fast solution to set up, and great if you find yourself with a fresh Windows install and no internet connection.

If you need to search within certain file types for some pattern, first list all of the files you need to check, then search within them. For example, to find a Java or Python program that flips an image you could do this:

findstr "\.java \.py" dirlist.txt > narrowlist.txt
findstr /i /r /f:narrowlist.txt "flip.*image"