Search Application help

Hey all.

Been a long time since I've actually coded anything in VB, or anything for that matter. I did some PHP programming last year, that's about it.

So, let's cut to the chase. I have currently come upon the need to develop an application at work to search through a list of folders. I have come up with a script in dos already to do this, which will search through all the directories/subfolders to look for txt files that contain the search word/phrase. However, the people who will be using this application may not have write access to the drive on the network that holds the path to all these directories.

I am unsure yet if I will get approval for this, and may end up with readonly access still. I'm not sure yet if this will present a problem for me or not, as I was planning on just making a simple app that would run the batch file from within a specific folder in the directory depending on what choice out of a listbox the user chooses.

Let me show this visually, if I've already lost you with all the nonsense above.

We will call the root directory HOME.

HOME will contain around 18 folders, each folder represents a software version.. e.g.
Version 2.02
Version 3.00
Version 3.00
Version 3.06

You get the picture. Within each of these folders there is another folder, let's call it Service Packs.

I won't begin to explain the horrible structure that follows behind this folder in each of its parent Version folders.

So I want a listbox that lists the version folders (or I may do a listview, or something else) that i can expand out and go a little further to narrow down to Patch level. The patch folder is the last folder I want to be able to use my batch file to search through.

I'm really just looking for ideas on how to go about all this. Maybe I'm making it harder than it needs to be.

Here is my code for the batch script that ive used to test folders and text files i made.

Code:

---

@echo off
:SEARCH
set /p choice=Enter the search word or phrase to find the QF:


FINDSTR /s /i /L /c:"%choice%" *.txt

set /p exit= Do you want to try to search again: 1 for yes, 2 for no.
IF %exit%==1 GOTO SEARCH
IF %exit%==2 exit

---

I would remove the user input from the batch file to use with an actual VB app obviously, and just run the batch in the background. However, I would need a way to return the path and text file that FINDSTR returns.

TL;DR , conclusion: I need ideas how which route to go to make a VB app to allow some selection of which direction to begin the search in, and use a batch file to search starting with that directory (and all subfolders) for a keyword/phrase that will be found in txt files at the very end of each subfolders path. I then need to return the paths to each of these files, so that the user can then just launch the txt files from the VB app.

Any ideas would be appreciated. I haven't even loaded VB on my computer yet, still searching for my discs...thus I haven't even gotten a chance to try anything out myself other than the batch script.

Thanks~ :)