Search your FTP server at lightning speed

Did you know that using WinSCP, you can run a search on your FTP to find all the documents containing a given string? It's native in WinSCP; nothing more to install but...

Other WinSCP tricks on this blog: download files with a specific extension recursively and synchronize host and remote.

However, it's insanely slow; let's see how we can do it better and almost instantaneous.

WinSCP - Search for Text​

Probably you never had noticed (it was my case), you can start searching files on your FTP server using WinSCP.

To do this, go to the Commands menu, then Static custom commands and finally Search for Text.... Type your search pattern and press Enter.

A new Powershell prompt will be started and you'll see the list of scanned files.

It's terribly slow and you'll get a huge list with all your files; not only the ones where the search pattern is retrieved. This function has the merit of existing, but it's not much.

php_grep​

Time flies... In 2016, I developed an ultra-fast little script called php_grep that scans every file present and, using a small regular expression, finds the files containing the search pattern and displays its location if the search is successful.

You just need to download a copy of my script (a single PHP page), copy the script on your FTP server and access it using a URL. Really easy.

This done, you'll get an interface where you can type, for sure, the search expression but also restricts the search to f.i. .html files.

More info on https://github.com/cavo789/php_grep

The trick here is to search on the server, so nothing has to travel over the wire. When the files are already on your own disk, the same "lightning speed" feeling is provided by ripgrep.