The switches can be lowercase or uppercase.įor the “string” parameter, you must surround the string with double quotes, otherwise the find command will not work and will return an error. You can get help to see all the available switches for the find command by typing the following line at the prompt and pressing Enter. Most commands have optional switches that modify the default operation of the command. Switches and Parameters for the find Command

We don’t recommend disabling UAC entirely. NOTE: You may not see this dialog box, depending on your User Account Control settings. If the User Account Control dialog box displays, click Yes to continue. Then, right-click on the Command Prompt item under Best match and select Run as administrator from the popup menu. Using the find command as administrator is safe as it doesn’t change or delete any files.Įnter cmd.exe in the Search box on the Taskbar. Just be careful what commands you run as administrator on the command line. However, it does help you avoid annoying confirmation dialog boxes. Opening the Command Prompt window as administrator is not necessary. Open the Command Prompt Window with Administrative Privileges Today we’ll cover how to use the find command and we’ll provide some examples. NOTE: The find command is not suitable for large files or large numbers of files. The find command searches for text strings in files and returns the lines of text from the files in which the text string was found. There’s a faster way to search the contents of files on your hard drive using the command line.

Windows find files containing text