Now that Windows Server 2012 is available, I am hoping that a glaring defect in Windows Server 2008 R2 has been solved. Does anyone know if it is possible and how do I find or search by actually reading data from the Windows Server 2012 file system ... without using a "search" index?
- I don't want an index of possible future searches limited by options in an "Indexing Options" control applet of Windows Search Service!
- I do want all file types and file name extensions included
- I do want to match on partial strings (find cde within abcdefg for example)
- I do want to search both by file or folder name
- I do want to search for strings/substrings within the contents of ANSI text, BINARY, or UNICODE text files
- I do want some flexibility such as start path, subfolder, wildcard values to match, etc., typical end-user request
- I do not want to install a 3rd party tool on the server, I'd like to use already available built-in Microsoft utilities
- I repeat: I do NOT want to use the (next to worthless) Windows Search Service Index
The production servers I typically administer do NOT even have the Windows Search Service installed. I just want an on-demand search that actually reads the NTFS volume contents searching EVERYTHING in a specified path (no matter what the file type or file name extension).
I also recognize there are 3rd-party tools available (and other operating systems) which do this very well, but I am limited to what is already present in the Windows operating system and as a best practice I do not want to add more code that will need to be maintained. For example, is there a PowerShell cmdlet that will read everything in a given path and select results based on a partial string match? I don't want to write a script, but a couple pipelined commands might do the trick. Something that I can memorize and type again without having to load a PowerShell library of scripting tools would be nice.
P.S. This question was posed with reference to Windows Server 2008 R2 and a complicated scripted solution was proposed in that thread: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverfiles/thread/598a6a0f-05ff-4d9d-ace2-6e7f02bc081b.