Have to search through LOTS of files...

General discussions about Advanced Find and Replace
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GameGuy

Have to search through LOTS of files...

Post by GameGuy »

Part of my current job is to search through (many times per day) 20,000 text files, looking for references to certain text strings.

"Ultra Edit" takes nearly FOUR minutes to complete this search and the program is completely unusable during the operation. Not good.

I downloaded "Advanced Find and Replace" (along with many other programs) and it completes the search in a little over TWO minutes, which is obviously much better. But I'm wondering if there is anything else I can do to speed it up?

Is there any way to EXCLUDE certain folders? There are whole directory trees that I don't need to search, but I can't see any way to tell AFR *not* to search there.

Thanks. (This is probably the best option I've found so far -- and I've been downloading demos all afternoon.) There are some programs that INDEX hard drive files for lightning fast searches, but they don't seem to support text files with non-standard extensions. Ours are .gas

Abacre
Site Admin
Posts: 1223
Joined: Mon Jan 31, 2005 5:32 pm

Post by Abacre »

Hi,

Sure you may exclude folders with AFR.
Go to main menu Action - Options - Advanced - Folders to ignore

So if you add the folder:
c:\test\

It will also ignore all subfolders:
c:\test\aa\
c:\test\bb\

And so on.

To speedup searching instead of *.* mask use *.gas mask.
Kind regards,
Abacre Limited
http://www.abacre.com
support@abacre.com

GameGuy

DOH!

Post by GameGuy »

I didn't even see that...

Okay, here is another question:

A competing program, FileLocator Pro, gives me the ability to double click on one of my search results and bring up an external editor of my choice. (Even batch files.) Best of all, though, is that I can pass this editor a filepath, and a linenumber.

I wrote a batch file that can receive these two variables, open up Perforce (our version control system here at work), select the file in question, then open up Ultra Edit, load up the file, and go RIGHT TO the appropriate line number.

FileLocator Pro does everything I need... but there's one problem. Your program does searches almost TWICE as fast. I hate having to sit around all day waiting for search results. (Actually, FileLocator Pro doesn't have Replace functionality either, but I'm not sure I'll need that.)

Do you have any plans to implement this kind of functionality in "Advanced Find and Replace"?

Abacre
Site Admin
Posts: 1223
Joined: Mon Jan 31, 2005 5:32 pm

Post by Abacre »

Other customers requested about the same feature. So we are working on
it right now. If everything goes OK we will develop it until 1st November.
Kind regards,
Abacre Limited
http://www.abacre.com
support@abacre.com

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