Using third-party apps or the command line
Search multiple text files for entered text at once
Have you ever had to find text in a bunch of different text files? If you’re in IT, you may have run into this problem often. Maybe you’re looking for a specific sentence in log files, or maybe you’re a programmer and need to find some code that’s in a bunch of different code files.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do this in Windows. The default Windows search is terrible for this kind of task, as it is super slow and does not allow for advanced searches. Luckily, there are several other ways that are much better than Windows search, which I will mention in this post. I won’t go into detail about each solution, but you can Google it to find out more.
If you don't want to install any third-party software and you're comfortable with the command line, then you should check out the built-in searches section below. I'm assuming most people are more comfortable with GUI interfaces, so I'll list the programs first.
