>>> import this
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!


>>> from __future__ import braces
  File "<stdin>", line 1
SyntaxError: not a chance

Python to the Rescue!

So I wrote up this small little Python script which will recursively search all the text documents in a directory tree. By text documents I mean anything that isn’t binary, so it will search just about any kind of source code.

The syntax is very simplistic, with only two arguments, one of which is optional.

search.py [directory] searchstring

The search string should be in quotes if it contains anything but alphanumeric characters, and you should, of course, escape quotes in the string.

Example Usage

search.py "Hello World"
search.py include "$unknownvariable"
search.py "<table colspan=\"2\">"

You can find this script at Tools\Scripts\byext.py in your python installation. If you’re on linux, the script may not come with your distro’s packaged version, in a which case I’ve provided a zip of it.