8 Best Free File Search Tools

Search your Windows computer easier with a file search tool

A free file search tool is exactly what it sounds like—freeware that searches files on your computer. These free file search tools are robust programs, many with dozens more features than the built-in search function your computer has now.

If you’ve always been great at naming and organizing the hundreds or thousands (or more) files on your computer, you might need one of the programs. On the other hand, if you have files all over the place, across several hard drives, a free file search tool is a must.

Wise JetSearch

Supports wildcard searches.

Can search all connected drives at once.

No search history.

Can’t search across networks.

Wise JetSearch is a free file search utility that can search for files on any attached drive in Windows.

It can search for files on NTFS or FAT drives and supports wildcard search terms for a more flexible search. All connected drives can be searched through at once, including external drives.

Quick search is a small hidden bar that hovers at the top of your screen. You can search from anywhere by just focusing your mouse on it to reveal the search box. Results open in the full program.

Everything

Can search across network.

Accessible through right-click menu.

Lightweight; ideal for old, slow computers.

No way to shield specific content from search.

Searches restricted to file names.

Everything is another free file search tool for Windows with a super clean program interface that supports tons of awesome features.

You can use Everything to search from the Windows right-click context menu and find files across several NTFS drives at once, both internal and external ones.

As you begin searching for files, the results show up instantly — there’s no need to wait or press Enter. Newly added or modified files are added to Everything in real-time, so there’s no need to manually re-index the database. According to the Everything website, it takes one second to index around a million files.

There’s a toggle in Everything’s settings you can use to exclude any custom, system, or hidden file and folder from search results to narrow down what you’re looking for.

Everything also includes an HTTP and FTP server so you can access the files of networked computers that also have the program installed.

It would seem the features would stop here, but Everything is even free for commercial use, includes a portable download option, and lets you save searches as bookmarks for easy recall.

Duplicate File Finder

Easily and quickly weeds out multiple instances of files.

Works with all file types.

Highly customizable searches.

Comes bundled with other software (but you can opt out).

No «move» option for duplicate files (just «delete»).

There are lots of programs out there that can search for files, but not all of them are made to find duplicate files. This program from Auslogics, aptly called Duplicate File Finder, does just that.

It’s really easy for a hard drive to become overwhelmed with videos and music since those types of files take up lots of space. It’s also simple to accidentally download music you already have, and if you suspect you’ve done that, or that you have old backups you no longer need, a duplicate file finder can clean up the copies.

This file search program can look for duplicates of all file types, or you can pick just images, audio files, videos, archives, and/or application files.

After you pick the file type to look for, the search criteria page lets you specify some settings to make the search really customized. You can ignore files smaller and/or larger than a certain size, ignore file names and file dates, ignore hidden files, and search for files that have certain words in the file name. All of these settings are optional.

You can also specify what should happen to the duplicates that you delete: send them to the Recycle Bin, store them in the built-in Rescue Center in case you want them again later, or delete them permanently.

When it’s time to delete the files, you can sort the duplicates by name, path, size, and date modified. The program automatically selects one of the duplicates so that deleting is just a couple of buttons away.

Be sure to decline any third-party software offers during installation if you only want the file search tool.

How to print list of Files in a Folder in Windows 10

If you ever need to print a list of files in a folder on your Windows 10/8/7 computer, here are a few ways you can do it. You can use the Command Prompt, Paint or a free software.

Print list of files in a folder in Windows 10

You can use any of the following methods to print a list of Files in a Folder in Windows 10.

1. Run the Dir List command
2. Use Paint software
3. Use a freeware.

Let us see these methods in detail.

1] Using Command Prompt

Open the folder whose list of contents you want to print. Hold down Shift and right-click to open the hidden context menu items. You will see Open command window here. Click on it to open a command prompt window.

Else simply type CMD in the address bar and hit Enter to open the command prompt window there.

In the CMD type the following and press Enter:

A notepad text file will be immediately created in this folder. Open List.txt, and you will be able to see the list of the files in this folder.

Alternatively, you could also use the cd/ command to change the directory from the User directory to Downloads directory as follows:

2] Using Paint

Open the directory whos contents list you want to print. Select the Lists view. Press Alt+PrntScr. Next, open the built-in Paint application. Click Ctrl+V to copy-paste the contents of the clipboard here.

Now from the File menu of Paint select Print.

3] Use a freeware

You can print the name of every file on a drive, along with the file’s size, date and time of last modification, and attributes, Read-Only, Hidden, System, and Archive, with Karen’s Directory Printer. You can also sort the list of files by name, size, date created, date last modified, or date of last access. You can download it from its home page.

A) Simple File Lister does the function of DIR command for Windows OS to get a list of files in a directory and save them with their attributes to the user, in chosen .TSV, .CSV or .TXT formats, which you can then print. You can also select the File Attributes to be printed.

B) InDeep File List Maker lets you create and print a list of files in your folders, drives, and even in your DVDs/CDs.

D) Startup Discoverer is a portable freeware application, which lists start-up file & program locations and allows you to save and print them.

Command to list all files in a folder as well as sub-folders in windows

I tried searching for a command that could list all the file in a directory as well as subfolders using a command prompt command. I have read the help for «dir» command but coudn’t find what I was looking for. Please help me what command could get this.

6 Answers 6

The below post gives the solution for your scenario.

/S Displays files in specified directory and all subdirectories.

/B Uses bare format (no heading information or summary).

/O List by files in sorted order.

If you want to list folders and files like graphical directory tree, you should use tree command.

There are various options for display format or ordering.

Check example output.

Answering late. Hope it help someone.

An addition to the answer: when you do not want to list the folders, only the files in the subfolders, use /A-D switch like this:

An alternative to the above commands that is a little more bulletproof.

It can list all files irrespective of permissions or path length.

I have a slight issue with the use of C:\NULL which I have written about in my blog

But nevertheless it’s the most robust command I know.

If you simply need to get the basic snapshot of the files + folders. Follow these baby steps:

• Press Windows + R
• Press Enter
• Type cmd
• Press Enter
• Type dir -s
• Press Enter

Following commands we can use for Linux or Mac. For Windows we can use below on git bash.

List all files, first level folders, and their contents

List all first-level subdirectories and files

10 Free Tools To Save or Print a List of File and Folder Contents

Whether you need to do so for yourself or for someone else, there is sometimes a need to create a listing of the contents of a particular directory, set of directories, or a whole drive. With the size of hard drives today reaching multiple Terabytes, keeping track of all the stored files would be quite useful. It’s quite easy to find out what files are taking up the most drive space but it’s also handy to know what files are stored where.

There are very simple ways of getting a list of files in a folder without external software. One option is using the Windows command “Dir [folder] > File.txt” from the Command Prompt. However, messing around with console commands is not to everyone’s liking and Dir is also quite limited. Here’s a selection of 10 free tools to save or print out content lists of the files inside your folders including to plain text file, an Excel spreadsheet, or an HTML document. All tools were tested in Windows 10 and 7.

1. FileListCreator

What makes FileListCreator a potentially very useful program is the number of available options in specific areas. It has several different file formats you can save to, including text file, HTML page, comma separated value file (CSV), Excel spreadsheet, and even image files (PNG, JPG, or BMP). FileListCreator has a portable version, is multi-platform, and free to use (donations are welcomed by the author).

You can add multiple files and folders from different directories or drives by simply using the buttons or dropping them onto the window. The lower pane in the interface is a live preview of the output format which you can copy to the clipboard or save. There’s a huge amount of columns you can add to the list including specific columns for images, audio files, video files, text files, documents, attributes, and checksums. Limited output format options such as fonts and colors are found in the Settings.

2. Snap2HTML

Snap2HTML is a portable tool that is able to generate a single HTML file that lists all folders and files from a predefined root folder. It’s the one tool in this list we actually use ourselves to make content lists of external drives. What makes Snap2HTML so useful is it creates the most functional and visually appealing HTML file from any tool we’ve seen. It’s very easy to navigate through the list of files and folders in your browser.

The configuration options are few with tick boxes to include hidden or system files. The Link files option turns file entries into clickable links so you can execute a file directly from the HTML page. Drives or folders are searched recursively. The HTML page looks and behaves a lot like Windows Explorer complete with an expandable tree view down the left and a search option. You can edit the template.html file yourself if you know some CSS. Snap2HTML has command line options for use with Command Prompt and batch files.

3. DirLister v2

DirLister is a tool that we have talked about before. The original from back in 2005 is available on the developer’s website which doesn’t have a .NET 4.6 requirement. The newer version 2 currently in beta is portable and more feature rich than the old version. One improvement is the ability to add multiple drives or folders to the list at once. Use the “Select folder” button or simply drop a folder onto the window.

In addition to HTML and plain text files, you have the option to save as a CSV file, an XML file, a JSON file, or a markdown file. Multiple output formats can be selected at once. There’s also a filter where you can add normal wildcards (like *.jpg) or Regex if you know how to use it. Optional Explorer integration makes it easy to create a file list from the right click context menu. The HTML page DirLister v2 creates is good and probably only second to Snap2HTML.

4. Arclab Dir2HTML

Dir2HTML is a tool that used to be freeware but Arclab took the program full shareware back in 2013/2014. However, we found the last freeware version from 2011 and look at that here as it still works fine in Windows 10. While it might not have as many features as the latest paid version, the old free version of Dir2HTML has a number of useful options to aid in the creation and customization of the HTML index file.

It supports recursive folder indexing, a simple file mask, creating a sub-section for each subfolder, excluding hidden files and folders, including size and date, and many other options. The right side of the window allows you to tailor the output HTML file visually and you can add a customized title, alter the font sizes, colors, and resize different areas of the output. Many of the options can be left alone if the standard layout is acceptable.

5. Karen’s Directory Printer

Directory Printer has been a popular tool for several years for printing and saving file and folder lists. This is because there’s a lot of options you can configure to get the output to your liking. Files have 15 pieces of information that can be displayed including names, dates, sizes, attributes, and checksums. Also included is a file mask filter that already has five format presets built-in for images, music, documents, etc.

There are various save options for hidden and system files, sorting, and what to include/exclude. The separate Print and “Save to Disk” tabs have a few different options to allow you to set different output formatting. There’s a right click context menu function in the Settings tab. Sadly, the only truly useful output file format is a text file. You can extract the setup installer with 7-Zip to create a portable program.