How to view contents of file without opening the file?

Question

Does anyone know of a utility that will allow you to quickly view the contents - or a part thereof - of a file (particularly Word files) without having to open the file? I have thousands of files restored after a disk failure, but their filenames have been lost and replaced with sequential numbers. The only way of knowing the contents is to open the file, a tedious process for so many. I seem to recall seeing a shareware app that allowed this. Thanks for any help.
MacBook Pro 17   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Answer 1

Open the Script Editor in the /Applications/AppleScript/ folder and paste in the following:
tell application "Finder"
repeat with this_num from 1 to 5
set the_item to item this_num of window 1
set the_name to name of the_item
set the_text to (read (the_item as alias) from 1 to 15)
tell application "TextEdit"
set text of document 1 to (text of document 1) & the_name & return & the_text & return & return
end tell
end repeat
end tell
Before running the script, place the folder containing the files in the frontmost Finder window; you may want to split the files between several different folders and process each folder before heading on to the next one. The numbers in blue can be customized as needed; the first one controls how many files the script will search on each run, and the other two define what part of the file will be searched. The output from a file which is in a format other than plain text may contain document formatting and other content which will look like random characters.
(19999)