Utility for string searches on remote server

Question

I need a utility that I can run on my Windows 7 PC, that will give me the capability to do string searches on ASCII files (HTML, SHTML, CSS, JS, etc.) residing on a REMOTE Linux/Apache server. Reason being: I'm administrating for a department and need to find, for example, all of the files that have a specific CSS file linked in. I can't do this w/ Dreamweaver or Filezilla, which I've always used for development work. Now I need an admin tool. Can anybody reco a utility that would allow me to do that?

Note: I do have FTP access to the server for sure. Not sure about SSH, as I'm not much of a network guy - more a designer. They had me install "Pulse" for the VPN connection. I would expect not to have too much power, as I'm a developer not an admin. That's what kind of complicates this.

Answer 1

Just use a remote shell such as a ssh or telnet client for windows, there are lots including telnet from the command line and them there are lots of ways of searching on Linux such as find + grep or a python script.

You could even install python on your windows machine and use it to automate the whole process of doing a remote login and the search.

Answer 2

If you have only FTP, then the sad truth is that you can not perform searches remotely.

You will have to download everything locally and search locally.

There might be programs that help with this particular operation (for instance searching files in memory just after download, without saving files to the disk), but I don't know any.