The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

One of the "portables" programmers whom I (and I know many others) highly respect has just come out with a file-searching program! Snowbird has been my program of choice for this, but a new kid's in town...There'll be a showdown at high noon.

Website:
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/search_my_files.html

Download:
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/searchmyfiles.zip

Category: Files - Search

Synopsis: "SearchMyFiles is an alternative to the standard "Search For Files And Folders" module of Windows. It allows you to easily search files in your system by wildcard, by last modified/created/last accessed time, by file attributes, by file content (text or binary search), and by the file size. SearchMyFiles allows you to make a very accurate search that cannot be done with Windows search. For Example: You can search all files created in the last 10 minutes with size between 500 and 700 bytes.
After you made a search, you can select one or more files, and save the list into text/html/csv/xml file, or copy the list to the clipboard.
SearchMyFiles is portable, and you can use it from a USB flash drive without leaving traces in the Registry of the scanned computer."

Writes settings to: Application folder

How to extract: Download the portable ZIP package and extract to a folder of your choice. Launch SearchMyFiles.exe

Stealth: Yes

Unicode support: (I'm not sure)

License: Freeware

Sys. Reqs.: "This utility works on any version of Windows starting from Windows 2000 and up to Windows 2008."

Screenshot:

its nice and small

but i still prefer everything since its similiar and quicker

Well, I think "Everything" (suggested here, for those who don't know the program) uses indexing (or I guess "disc cataloging" or somesuch), whereas this is non-indexing. (FYI, I do use indexing as well, via the program Cathy.)

SearchMyFiles one could be a little more user friendly, though: some sort of drag-and-drop support, the "base folders" area (which is important!) has definite issues with long path names. I'll still be using Snowbird for now, but I look forward to this app's continued maturing! And Nir Sofer's usually pretty good about that.

good stuff! this is the kind of search app i've always wanted. i don't use indexing, i have no need for the extra speed, but these accurate searches are great.

i've already emailed and asked for a basic command line switch to define the starting directory so i can map this to CTRL-F and have it start in the active folder in Directory Opus. hope he likes the idea!

Love it!
I do a regular search of new files as a precaution after I've tried out new programs and stuff. This is so easy to set up to list everything created in the last day or hour.
So much less hassle than clicking through the advanced options on the Windows search function.

LIke everything from Nils Sofer, this one seems robust.
I will see how much I use it. I don't think I will give up Everything, however, because, there is an always open 'find' edit field.

SearchMyFiles is more conventional, very fast to create the index, and has much to commend it. Everything, on the other hand has one great advantage: Open the window, and whatever you type immediately shows up. For example, I was cropping some photos, and lost track fo where one experiemental program put a couple of the cropped photos. I opened Everything, typed "peli", and the window suddenly showed 15 files and directories with Peli in the filename or folder name, most of which were clipart, but included my errant files. SearchMyFiles, in my 5 min intro, jumped down from file to file.

Both are now on my USB stick, and let's see if they both stay there.

Very big changes to this program. It now look inside Word and (if some items are installed) PDF. Entry updated.