Having trouble finding a word in multiple files

[Peter Flynn]

On 15/06/2020 12:51, Liam Proven wrote:
[...]
> I didn't say it could not be done. I said it would be ludicrously slow.
> 
> I have 12GB of data in my Dropbox. Any search involving file
> conversions would be unusable. 

I would nevertheless be interested in trying that some time. It would 
make a great reference datum.

> I would walk to another room, wake my Mac, tap cmd-space "phrase I'm 
> looking for" and before I sat down I'd be looking at a list of
> partial matches.
Absolutely. If you must use binary files, do it on a Mac. Spotlight is 
good; Liquid is even better (http://www.liquid.info/liquid.html)

> I do not know if you are aware of this but cloud storage services
> like this charge by the amount stored.

I believe so.

> Again, no. In my considered opinion, trying to attack this problem 
> with conversions is completely the wrong approach and will not bring 
> any good satisfying resolution, ever, under any circumstances.

No, it works fine as an ad hoc solution. I just tried it on my home 
directory and everything under it, which is 124GB. But only 148 .docx 
files, and I was explicitly limiting the search to those. My name occurs 
in 33 of them, and that was a sub-second search. Repeating that for the 
4,319 .tex files returned 1,021 of them in under 5 sec, which is 
acceptable. I also have 9,257 .xml documents, some of them 30MB+, and 
searching all of them took 18 secs.

> Once again for the gallery: *conversion is not the answer here.*

Only as a once-off solution, which is what the OP asked for, and 
depending on the volumes. This kind of flexibility is why one uses Linux 
(including Macs), not Windows.

Peter