This Command Prompt Trick Searches Way Faster Than Windows Explorer

Searching for a file in Windows Explorer takes forever, but there’s a faster way if you’re willing to use the command prompt.

The amazing Twitter account SwiftOnSecurity posted this gem yesterday:

Stupid dirty cheap way to search an entire Windows drive for wildcard text in a file name, that I use all the time. 50x faster than trying to use Explorer.

1.) dir "search term*" /s

means start from root and /s means subdirectories
Example shows all .log files:
dir *.log /s

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) April 30, 2018

You can use this trick to search any drive and will usually finish in a few seconds. In the screenshot above, for example, I searched my drive for all files that include “justinpot” in the name by running dir \*justinpot* /s. Swift, in the tweet, searched for all log files on a drive by running dir \*.log /s.

Confused? Let’s break this down:

• dir is a command used to show files in the current directory, but which can also show files anywhere in the system.
• The backslash tells dir to search from the root directory of the current drive.
• /s tells dir to search all subdirectories.
• Finally, * is used by command line apps as a wildcard. So *.txt will show you all files that end with “.txt”, while project* will show you all filenames that begin with the word “project”

Put it all together and you’ve got a quick way to search any drive pretty quickly. Give it a try, but note that this won’t work in PowerShell.