Why does FIND on Windows 7 give an "Access Denied" error? [closed]

I have an administrator account on a Windows 7 x64 machine. It is not THE administrator account, the account is simply a member of the administrators group.

The install is default. When the user opens a command prompt it ends up in the users' %HOMEPATH% directory where you'll find various directories like the Documents folder. If the user uses the following (windows) FIND command, an "Access Denied" error occurs:

FIND /I "My String" C:\Users\Rann\Documents
Access denied - C:\USERS\RANN\DOCUMENTS

Using runas or right-clicking on the command prompt to run it as an administrator does not change this behaviour; an administrator-level cmd.exe still gives me the same error. Changing the path to any other directory gives the same error.

My question is thus: How is one supposed to use the FIND (and possibly other) commands? What rights are needed?

You are trying to execute find on a directory. It only works on files. Try this:

FIND /I "My String" C:\Users\Rann\Documents\*

That is true, it seems that Find no longer recurses down anymore. But hey, no worries, we can use a little scripting help here. Here is one that I tried and it works:

for /R %G in (*) do (find "String_I_am_Looking_For" %G)

This will search all the sub-folders.

This may produce several lines of output. So it may be easier to direct the output to a file:

for /R %G in (*) do (find "String_I_am_Looking_For" %G) >> output.txt

And then look for the search string in this file (you can use visual inspection or Ctrl+F for find here).

This is not right. FIND used to search all subdirectories, but no longer 'can' because of Win 7's security. You have to mount the filesystem OFFLINE to properly use FIND.