Listing, Searching and Deleting Files

There are tons of ways to do this:

to list the files:
* use the filelistbox directly
* use the DIR command
* use some API (should be fastest)
* use the filesystemobject

After that, you want to filter:
* key filename or by content?

Then, to individually manage them:
* to view in notepad: shell "notepad.exe yourpath\yourfile"
* to delete: kill "yourpath\yourfile"

CHeers

Preferably filter by content.

That means, after the listing of the files, you need to open and read each of the files to find out if it contains the keyword.

* read a file with VB directly:
dim filenumber as long
dim strLine as string
filenumber = freefile
OPEN "yourfile" FOR INPUT AS #filenumber
WHILE NOT EOF(filenumber)
  LINE INPUT #filenumber, strLine
WEND
CLOSE #filenumber

* read a file with FileSystemObject
dim fs as FileSystemObject
dim tf as TextStream
dim strData as string

set fs = new FileSystemObject
set tf = fs.OpenTextFile("filename", ForReading)
strData = tf.ReadAll

* some API (again fastest, but also more code)

Cheers

to improve speed open files as binary access read and read them to byte array:
  dim b() as byte, size as integer
  size=filelen(path)
  redim b(size-1)
  get #1,,b
and then convert to string for searching:
  dim s as string
  s=strconv(b,vbUnicode)

the line:

open strFilename for as #iFileNumber

should be:

open strFilename for binary as #iFileNumber

--
Note that you don't need to use Get to read the data into a byte array since it can be read directly into a string using Input$.

OK all this code suggestions gave me ideas that helped a lot. You all deserved points.