I am in the middle of writing a tool that finds lost files of an iTunes library, for both Mac and Windows. On the Mac, I can quickly find files by naming using the wonderful "CatalogSearch" function.
On Windows, however, there seems to be no OS API for searching by file name (or is there?).
After some googling, I learned that there are tools (like TFind, Everything) that read the NTFS directory directly and scan it to find files by name.
I would like to do the same, but without having to start from scratch (although I've written quite a few disk tools in the past, I've never had the energy to dig into NTFS).
I wonder if there are ready-made libs around, possibly as a .dll, that would give me this search feature: Pass in a file name, get back its path.
Alternatively, what about the Windows indexing service? At least when I tried this on a recently installed XP Home system, the Search operation under the Start menu would actually scan all directories, which suggests that it has no complete database. As I'm not a Windows user at all, I wonder why this isn't working.
In the end, the complete solution I need is: I have a list of file names to find, and I need code that searches the entire disk (or uses a DB for it) to get me all results in one go. E.g, the search should not start a new full scan for every file I'm looking up. That's why I think the MFT way would be optimal, as it could quickly iterate over all names, comparing each to my list.
