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aToad #29: FileSeek

Freeware to search in huge text files

Big text files are a recurrent issue for me. Not that I deal with them often, but when I do, they are indeed huge, and the tools I usually use, such as Visual Studio Code or Notepad++, just can’t deal with them.

I eventually found a blog post listing a bunch of software supposedly able to cope with large text files. Some have apparently vanished, some can open the files but can’t really search in them. The one that I found best for my needs was FileSeek, which can’t open the files but can search in them (and display a bit of contents around the found text – the whole line actually -, which was pretty much what I wanted).

FileSeek free version, searching in multiple SQL backup files

On the minus side, it’s neither open source nor free. On the plus side, it does have a free version, with very few limitations compared to the paid one (I don’t even notice them). Also it’s able to search in multiple files at once, a feature I didn’t need at first but which turned out to be quite convenient.

Posted in A Tool A Day.


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