So you might create a script to search your Documents folder for. You don't just have to search for 'accounts*.pdf', for instance you can also search for 'business*.pdf', and 'business*.doc', while excluding file names containing 'August', and Effective File Search will find all the matches for you.Īnd the program even includes a scripting element to automate particular file management tasks. There's support for building up some quite complex logical expressions, too. Effective File Search can look for files according to their creation, modification or last access date, for example, and you can specify this as within any given date range, or just the previous few seconds/ minutes/ hours/ days (and so on). So the program doesn't just support a simple plain text search, for instance: it can also do a case-sensitive check, search for Unicode text, hex code ('1A FF D0'), even regular expressions. What's more surprising, though, is the depth you get with each of these operations.

At a minimum you might give the program a file specification (*.PDF, say), and point it at a particular folder, before simply clicking Search and waiting for the results to appear.Īnd just as you'd expect, you can also filter the results by file size or date, as well as searching only for files which contain specific text.

The tabbed interface looks very similar to many other search programs, and is very straightforward to use. Effective File Search is a free Windows search tool which comes packed with features and functionality.

File searching software