Archive Search

The "Search in archives" option utilizes the 7zip engine to search inside 7z, zip, jar, rar and many other archive file types. dnGrep will search the file hierarchy within archives and will also recursively search archives within archives.

When searching and showing files in search results panel, dnGrep extracts files to memory, not to disk. However, to preview a file in the Preview window, the file is extracted to a temporary folder.

Solid archives (7z and RAR) are much slower to search - maybe 1000x slower. If you are making archives to search, turn off the solid option in 7z and RAR, or use another compression type. If you have a large solid archive with many files, and will be searching it multiple times, it is probably worth the time to expand the archive and recompress it in a non-solid format.

Generally, it is better to use a file type filter and keep the Include binary files option enabled in large or solid archives. To exclude binary files, dnGrep must extract every file in the archive to memory to check if it is binary or not. Using a file filter limits the number of files extracted, skipping binary file types.

Note: the Include subfolders and Max depth filters are not used in archives, the whole archive is searched.

dnGrep treats archives are read-only and does not allow doing updates to files in archives.

See the Options section for details on how to configure the archive file types.