I keep some logs in a directory just in case I need to reference them later. The kind of data that has saved my bacon on a handful to times. Of course, it has over 3,000 files (16GB) in the directory. Of those less than a hundred were potentially relevant. And in the end only a couple dozen had the data I sought.

Windows Explorer used to make this easy to search. I could put in the pattern I wanted and tell it to search the text within them. It would give me the file name for each containing the search string. For whatever reason Windows 7 had to make it more difficult.

So, I wrote the easiest of Powershell scripts:

$filelist=D:\path\to\*files*.log
Get-Content $filelist | Select-String -pattern “Search String“

Good thing too because apparently I need to to go through my Indexing Options and identify every file extension I want to search to index file contents. What a royal pain. My guess is doing so would also blow up the EDB data file from its currently 2GB to something way larger. 10GB? 50? 100? Yuck.