With LookDisk you can, among many other things, search for text in one or more .ZIP files without having to extract the contents. It's not the only feature of the program, but it's the one that makes it unique. Doing this manually is very tedious: you have to extract each ZIP file, open all the text documents, and search for the text in each one. The amount of time you'll save on searches is enormous.
When you start the program, on the left side you'll find all of LookDisk's functions. With the application you can find duplicate files, search for specific files, access an overview of your disk, and of course find any line of text within the text files stored on your computer, including those inside compressed files. We're going to focus on searching text across your entire computer, including compressed files, which is the option that makes LookDisk unique.
How to search text in compressed files
To search text on your computer, including in compressed files, you'll need to click on the Search Text button. Once you do that, you'll see a new window open where you can type the text you want to search for. After entering the text, you'll find several options that you need to enable or disable.
You can set the number of output lines in case of a match for both text or numbers (maximum 9), you can also show sentences before and after the match, among many other options. You can enable or disable them according to your search needs.
Once you've configured the search, you'll have to click OK; the window will close and you'll return to the platform interface, where you'll see all your disks. You can add more disks or folders manually from the Add option, and you can remove disks or folders by unchecking them. It's recommended to put everything you want to analyze in a single folder and perform a search there; otherwise, scans of the entire disk are very slow and take a long time.
After that, all you have to do is click the green Search button, and the platform will start performing the searches depending on what you enabled or disabled. At the top, the environment shows you the file and its location, and in the center the matches and the lines represented by numbers.
As you can see, the utility provides a very good solution for finding text in .ZIP files. Not only does it search for and find text in ZIP files, but it also works with RAR, CAB, 7-Zip, and other formats. LookDisk is a free program, executable and portable, available for Windows operating systems.
