How can I search for all temporary Windows files and get a list of individual items, not just file folders?

Question

It just occurred to me a little while ago that I hadn't deleted temporary and cached files on my computer in a long time, but I wanted to make sure I had copies of certain documents first so I did a search for all files called "temporary." Well, that pulled up a list of more than a hundred file folders with "temporary" in the folder name, but as you can figure it's going to be a pain to go through each individual folder. It's been a long time since I've searched for ONLY temporary files, and so I'm spinning my wheels trying to figure this out. How can I get a list of all of the temp files, not just the folders containing them? I'm using Windows XP.

Also, how can I search the cache in Firefox for files as well before I clear out the history?

Boboinks, I think the bigger problem with temporary files is in my Windows folders, not so much in Firefox, but I will definitely check out the Firefox folder. What about finding the temp files in Windows?

For the record, I never use IE. IE is half of "EVIL" :-D

AMTV, that URL had an error message on it. I don't want to have to mess with downloads if they aren't necessary, and I'm sure there was something I'd done before that pulled up all the temporary files in Windows so that I could browse them without having to download anything or do anything particularly unusual to view the list of temporary files. I'm looking for the simplest way to do this.

Tracy, I was primarily looking for older versions of ASP files from page changes I'd made on my website, but I actually don't see any ASP files at all in the temp folder, and in fact relatively few files at all considering it'd been several months since I last emptied the folder or deleted temp files from Windows. Am I just missing a step?

Answer 1

I take it you know the original file name? Or the extension?
You can do a cmd level directory search. (Start --> Run -- cmd) in the black "dos" screen just type

dir /s /b c:\windows\*.txt will show all files in the windows directory the the .txt extension for instance.

So to search for say doc files in the temp directory. (The good news is that all temp files in windows are generally in the windows\temp directory!)

dir /s /b c:\windows\temp\*.doc will return all document files that might be there.

dir /s /b c:\windows\temp\*.* will return a list of ALL files in the temp directory (you may want to output that to a file you can read cause it will be large) so
dir /s /b c:\windows\temp\*.* > templist.txt
will generate a file you can then open and read to hunt for your files. Many of these will not be useful files at all.
Now if you know the specific name you can use
dir /s /b c:\ myfile.* (this will take a long time) if you think you know the directory then only search that directory.
dir /s /b c:\files\myfile.* etc

So sometimes windows isn't the best method to use, the ol underlying operating system is! (One of the reasons I really like linux!!!!)

Now all that being said, there really shouldn't be any "real" live files in that directory! And if you just want to be sure you have a "copy" of certain documents, just go the documents folder and make a copy!!! Much easier than searching for a temporary (maybe non-existant) copy of that same file.

Hope that helps.
Merry Christmas and God Bless

ADDED:
ok try this
dir /s /b c:\*.asp
That will find every .asp file on your computer. and show the directory they are located. It may take a bit of time to run.
it you want you can also output that to a file as above.

You still wont have the actual asp file in the temp folder, Active pages are executed on the server and only the OUTPUT is sent to your temporary files folder. SO the results that are there are NOT THE ORIGINAL PAGE!
The only way to get the actual original page is ftp it back from the server so that the code isn't executed!
That is one of the nice things about ASP or PHP, a user/visitor only sees the final product and never sees the code that generated the output. (Makes it hard to "steal" code!)

Answer 2

OK, the easiest way to open temp files on IE is go to
Tools>Internet Options>Settings>View Files
it will open a folder containing all the temporary files for the browser.

And for Firefox, all you gotta do is download a plug-in called CacheViewer and open it. Here's the link:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2489

Answer 3

If you're just trying to clean up the temporary files. Just get a tool do it for you :) Try Crap Cleaner (http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4191.html), it's a freeware and gives you the option to specify the kind of things that you need to clean. searching manually can work, however you need to search for more than a single pattern (*.tmp", "*.dmp", or starting with a "~" and so on), most of the log files (*.log) you don't need, (yet you need some of them to stay intact though). you probably see a lot of hidden folders (with files in them) in the form of $NtUninstall.. (compressed blue in color), those are the uninstall entries after Windows does Windows update, it's ok to delete them but make sure to keep ($hf_mig$) folder.
If you are not familiar with all this I simply recommend you just leave CrapCleaner do the job for you.

Hope that helps :)