Sometimes we save some important web links in some files and forget which file has the links. Sometimes we even forget the file name. Only thing we remember is the folder where all these files are located. In this situation it becomes very frustrating to go through each of the files and check for the links somewhere in them.
Instead of manually reading all the lines inside all the files, we can simply use an application specialized in finding the web links – Vovsoft URL Extractor. It is a Windows application that can recurse through all the folders and check all the files for any URLs.
The user interface of Vovsoft URL Extractor allows for selecting the folder which should be scanned. After selecting a folder, we can choose to select the option to “Include Subfolders”. When this option is selected, it will recurse through all the sub-folders.
There is another option for filtering the files using a filename mask. For example, you can use a mask “FILE*.TXT” for all the files with filenames that begin with “FILE” and have an extension “.TXT”. The software has a “*.txt” as the filter set by default.
In the search results, it shows a list of all the files in which the links have been discovered. It also shows another list containing the discovered links. Some web links could be present multiple times in the same file. The same link could also be present in several files. In this case, we can click on the “Remove Duplicates” button to remove the duplicate links.
There are other programs available for Windows such grepWin which use RegEx to find URLs or other particular patterns. But Vovsoft URL Extractor is a no-brainer and straightforward app that requires no knowledge of RegEx.
You can download Vovsoft URL Extractor from https://vovsoft.com/software/url-extractor/.