Disk Recon 14.1

Harvesting (Regular Expressions)

The Harvesting feature scans the contents of files and extracts every line (or match) that satisfies a given regular expression. Unlike File Search, which tells you which files contain a pattern, Harvesting shows you the actual matching text extracted from every file — one row per match.

This is useful for pulling structured data out of large collections of log files, source code, configuration files, or documents.

How to Use It

Select the folder(s) to scan in the Control Panel and set a file filter (e.g. *.log or *.txt).
Go to the Regex Search tab.
Enter your regular expression in the search box.
Press Start. Each match is shown in the result grid together with the filename and line number.

Example Patterns

In the example below we're using a regular expression that matches any email address:

\b[A-Z0-9._%-]+@[A-Z0-9._%-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b

Disk Recon harvesting regular expression results

Other useful patterns:

Pattern	Matches
`\b\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\b`	IPv4 addresses (e.g. 192.168.1.1)
`https?://[^\s"'<>]+`	HTTP and HTTPS URLs
`\b\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}\b`	Dates in YYYY-MM-DD format
`ERROR[^\r\n]*`	Error lines in log files
`\b[A-Z]{2,4}-\d{3,6}\b`	Issue tracker IDs (e.g. JIRA-1234)

Additional Info

Unique matches only : Enable the "Show only unique matches" option in the Options screen to suppress repeated occurrences of the same string.
Reporting : Results can be exported to XLS, HTML, TXT, CSV, or XML from the menu bar.
Cancelling : Cancelling mid-scan shows results for all files processed so far — you do not lose partial results.