I needed to search for something amongst many PDF documents.

As usual, Microsofts XP search was totally useless… why have a search facility that deliberately ignores certain files and folders… its just wrong.

Anyway, not wanting to dig up and re-learn a trusty unix “find” and “grep”, I started looking for a pdf search utility.

It turns out I didn’t need to do any searching at all.

Adobe Reader actually has a built-in search utility (press Crtl-Shift-F), and then just select which folder to search in, and it will scan all pdf documents in that folder, looking for the your string.