Ever since Microsoft decided to remove the file search that actually worked in Windows XP, I’ve been trying to find an easy to use search tool. Turns out it exists – the findstr command line tool. so, for example,

findstr /L /S base.url *.xml

finds all xml files containing the string base.url. It also works for binary files, so when you need to see if a jar in a big list contains a class, you can do

findstr /L SAXSourceLocator *.jar

and it lists the files (together with some junk, but it’s useful none the less. the /L switch means literal comarison, but it can also do regex.