clarification about ripgrep functionality and possible example

[atereou]

Ripgrep is capable of searching any file content for text and can also process a whole drive in theory?
I don't know if this works, but if it does - how do I solve this in Windows exactly?
I'm in this folder C:\Users\Administrator\search\rg.exe
and my test file is here C:\Users\Administrator\search\ui\test.exe
test.exe contains the string below and ripgrep must find it:
E X I T   H E L P
(EspaceXspaceIspaceTspacespacespaceHspaceEspaceLspaceP)
When I now run CMD in the 'search' folder, is there a command for ripgrep that will process the whole 'search' folder with subfolders?
How would I write the command exactly to find E X I T   H E L P in all files with .exe extension only?
Or is this totally not what ripgrep can do?

[BurntSushi]

When I now run CMD in the 'search' folder, is there a command for ripgrep that will process the whole 'search' folder with subfolders?

You should just be able to run .\rg.exe "E X I T H E L P" and it will recursively search your current directory. If you only want to search exe files, then you can add -g "*.exe". Presumably, exe files are in a binary format, so you'll probably also need to force ripgrep to treat it as text, which means using the -a (short for --text). So I think your complete command is probably:

$ .\rg.exe -g "*.exe" -a "E X I T  H E L P"

Note though that I am not a Windows user.

[atereou]

Yes, this works. Thanks!
Then I have one final question about the topic.
If the file is not EXE binary, but something like *.psd from Adobe Photoshop or Gimp *.xcf project files - are these file formats also supported? In this case what do I have to change in the command?
I mean can I specify here *.psd as search filter too or can I only do below in this case?
rg -a "texttofindinpsdfile" "path"

[BurntSushi]

ripgrep doesn't know about file formats. To ripgrep, files are just bytes. It reads and searches those bytes as is. The -a flag is necessary when searching binary formats because ripgrep will otherwise try to skip them, since you usually don't want to search binary files with a tool like ripgrep.

But sure, you can use -g "*.psd" if you want. But you don't need -g for it. -g just limits your search to file paths that match the glob. Otherwise, ripgrep will try to search everything.

[atereou]

Amazing - this works too. Thanks a lot for your answers!
I was going through 100 pages search results on Github to find a good search tool for Windows that can do all of this and which is eventually faster than the tool TextCrawler which beated all other tools I tested so far, but was still a bit slow for my requirements.
After doing some more testing I can confirm that ripgrep is blazingly fast in comparison.

[BurntSushi]

Great, glad to hear it!