Advice please-best way to approach this, searching for names in a sea of files Options

[Mr Dump]

I was wondering what would be the best way to automate this task I regularly do- Zzozzach's scripting question sort of looks along the lines but ... well, im new to this....
anyway heres what I do :

get a text list of variable names

search (I just cut/paste each lineone at a time into the windows explorer search bar - the actual search is surprisingly quick- i believe it is an indexed search)
for instance/s of that name in files in particular directories, the files of interest are *.c *.h *.doc *.pdf

make note of the hits

repeat.

I sometimes have 60 or so variable names, and it is a very slow process, which i'd love to automate.
The directories have about 4000 .c, .h files, and there are about 200 procedures .pdf,.doc.
It would be so good to have a text output that I can sort through, so as to match up what variables are set by what procedure and which c modules I need to grab to look in.

Is powershell scripting a suitable way to do this?
Is there a way to get a variable passed to the explorer search?

Laptop is W7, I have admin rights, btw.

Any pointers appreciated!

[Girvo]

If we were talking Bash, I could help :P

As it stands, this might point you in the right direction: http://subjunctive.us/2008/04/01/powershell-file-search/

[SledgY]

Good old windows batch files can do the text files:

Batch file (find_vars.bat):

CODE

@ECHO OFF
FOR /F %%G IN (vars.txt) DO FINDSTR /S /N /C:"%%G" *.c *.h *.py

And of course vars.txt looks like:

CODE

variable_1
variable_2

DOC files probably won't work, PDF technically should (most postscript is just text) but I can't guarantee it.

/edit I had *.py in there for my testing across a python project.
Also have you looked into search and replace tools?

This post has been edited by SledgY: Mar 19 2012, 12:07 PM

[Mr Dump]

thanks guys, I just found the select-string term for powershell, after a days manual reading, and then the dos findstr popped up ha ha! - I am more comfortable with batch files so I'll try follow that path first! Thanks sledgy I'll muck around with this, get my head around the parameters and see how I go! (will report in a day or three, depending on work madness!)
stoked! thanks again!

[SledgY]

Can help with an explaination:

CODE

FOR /F %%G IN (vars.txt) DO FINDSTR /S /N /C:"%%G" *.c *.h *.py

FOR
/F - loop over a text file and populate the variable %%G with each line

FINDSTR
/S - search through sub directories
/N - prints the line number prior to each match (added as it's kind of useful information!)
/C - tells findstr to do a literal search using the supplied value, in this case the value stored in the %%G variable

[Mr Dump]

Hi there, the findstr works pretty well, however I am having issues getting a redirect to a file working, e.g. >list.txt but I workaournd by using the select all / copy text option of the cmd window. Also not successful with parsing *.pdf as yet, but that has been an issue in the explorer search bar too, so I am wondering if that stems from the windows indexing function...
Anyway, i'm getting output, so i'm stoked! thanks

[SledgY]

There are tools that will let you search inside of a PDF.

One option is to use a tool like pdftohtml (from the poppler tool suite, there is a windows version) to extract text and from that do a search.

Alternatively the PyPDF library is a python library that can be used to manipulate and extract text from a PDF file.