If you’ve ever tried searching for files on Windows, you know the pain.
Windows Explorer search is slow, and PowerShell’s Get-ChildItem crawls on large directories. Tools like Everything are fast, but they’re GUI-first—not ideal when you need something scriptable and automation-friendly.
I wanted a lightning-fast, command-line tool for Windows that just works. So I built rq: an open-source file search utility written in modern C17, optimized for speed and simplicity.
⚡ Why rq?
-
Speed: Typically 3–7x faster than common alternatives like
Get-ChildItem - Parallel directory traversal: Built on the Windows Thread Pool API
- Flexible search: Supports glob, regex, and hidden files
- Powerful filters: Size, extension, date, file type
- Automation-friendly: Streams results as plain text or JSON
🔍 Example Usage
# Find all C/C++ source files
rq C:Dev "*.c" --glob --ext c,h
# Search for large images
rq D:Photos beach --ext jpg,png --size +500K
# Export recent documents as JSON
rq C:UsersmeDocuments report --ext pdf,docx --after 2025-01-01 --json
🛠️ Under the Hood
Building rq wasn’t just about speed—it was about handling the quirks of Windows:
-
Long paths & Unicode: rq uses
\?paths and UTF-8 internally - Thread pools over raw threads: Better scalability and resource control
- Minimal syscalls in hot paths: Avoid unnecessary overhead for performance
- Custom directory traversal logic: Fully parallel with dynamic work distribution
✅ Lessons Learned
- C17 is still fantastic for high-performance, low-overhead tools
- Windows APIs are powerful but tricky—path handling and Unicode are a minefield
- Thread pools > raw threads for stability and performance
- Avoid syscalls in tight loops for real speed gains
📦 Try It Out
rq is open source (MIT) on GitHub:
👉 https://github.com/seeyebe/rq
If you use Windows and need a fast, scriptable file search, give it a try!
Feedback, feature requests, and contributions are more than welcome.