This is a small autoit executeable compiled that when run presents a GUI that you can use to search hundreds of files in a few seconds for a text string in their content. The uncompiled autoit code can be obtained from the link below. It outperformed a Windows search for some reason we couldn't get results in the same way.
Firstly this isn't my own work, here is a link to the original author at Autoit.
"Martin": http://www.autoitscript.com/forum/topic/85567-find-string-in-files/ Thanks for the work, I did have to remark out a line before getting it to work though.
Now to explain why it is useful.
We had a situation where we wanted to ensure a certain NSE was making it to the NS and being processed. Unfortunately these events are hard to capture, NS can process faster than the naked eye. However...if you stop processing you get hundreds appear. Our solution isn't graceful but it worked beautifully.
1. If you have a large backlog in your queues it might be better to get a quiet time for this. This is the easiest method
2. Stop NS processing.
3. Commit the client side change...for us it was a custom inventory we launch that performs the collection and sends it to the NS immediately.
4. Copy the NSE's to another folder.
5. Start the NS processing.
6. You are left with the NSE's from before, during and a little after you started the process, depending on how busy the queue's are. For us it was 450 NSE's.
7. Run the tool, enter the search folder and the item you are looking for. For example we entered "michael.cole" as the string, "*" for all file types and the folder name we are looking through.
8. Follow the prompts, all NSE's with the search criteria will appear in a text file near the executeable.
9. Drop the NSE's you captured back into the queue.
You can run this "live" without stopping the event processing. I ran the tool on a queue with 4500 NSE's in it and it came back in less than 30 seconds with 50 different NSE's with the searched for item. It's pretty amazing how fast it is really. Once you have it setup, it saves your previous query and is faster to enter the details, basically allowing you to look through your received NSE's with ease.