How to search an artifact in the repository

I was looking for ways to search a file (e.g. sample.xml) in the repository directly. I am aware that if I load a workspace then I can search using lots of utilities that comes with the operating system or google desktop can create an index on the machine, but I wanted to poll for best practices that developers follow to search an artifact and particularly, how to grep the file contents directly in the repo without having to load everything. Thanks