How to search for objects across S3 buckets
Find objects by name, prefix, or glob across all your S3 buckets fast — without listing millions of keys by hand.
Why searching S3 is painful
S3 has no search. ListObjectsV2 returns keys in lexicographic order, 1,000 at a time, filtered only by prefix — so "find every .parquet file over 100 MB across my buckets" means paging through the entire keyspace yourself. On a bucket with millions of objects that's slow, and the AWS console can't do it at all.
How to do it in BucketPilot
BucketPilot builds a searchable index of your object metadata (key, size, storage class — never file contents). Once a bucket is indexed you can:
- •search by name with
*and?globs (e.g.logs/2026-*/*.gz), - •filter by prefix and storage class,
- •sort by size or date, and page through results instantly,
across every bucket you've connected — from the app or the public REST API. Very large buckets can index from a daily S3 Inventory report instead of a live scan. See indexing & search.
