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Locate text in files

A friend of mine was telling me about a problem that he had with his website Love is a Game. A user posted a comment on Stumbleupon claiming that his website would contain a virus which his anti-virus software reported. He mentioned the name of the virus as well and a text string of a different domain. My though was that he had misinterpreted the warning and that it was a warning from another website and not from my friends website.

He asked me what to do and I told him that he should download all the files on his website and scan them for this string that should appear somewhere if it was really from his website. (there is no dynamic advertisement currently which means that I could rule that possibility out).

I recommended the software Locate32 which is a fast indexing and searching software. It scans your files once and can then locate files, folders and text inside files in the matter of seconds. It does take a bit longer for searching for text inside files but this is not long either.

I did create a short video with Camtasia (grab Camtasia free here) and uploaded it to Youtube. Please note that it takes longer if you do have lots of files on your hard drive. It can take several minutes to scan all files.

The database needs to be up to date. If that is the case just select where you want to search for the text, click on the advanced tab afterwards and add the text that you want to find in the File containing text field.

Would you like me to create videos from time to time to visualize what I’m writing about ? Let me know please.

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.

Author: , Wednesday November 28, 2007 -
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Responses so far:

  1. Thank you Martin, for the recommendation, that neat little software did the job brilliantly.

    The scan proved that the specific text string was nowhere to be found on any of my files.

    Great tip!

  2. archer says:

    i highly recommend this lightning fast app. i dumped copernic when i found it.

  3. Liviu says:

    It’s not that lightning fast, but it’s ok.

  4. Terence Hill says:

    Locate32 is a very good software mainly for his purpose and only for simple text searches, not for more complicated searches.

    For more complicated searches I suggest a software called TextCrawler or the internal function of Notepad++ (both can even replace the found text), very good apps.

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