concrete5 has a search block out of the box! As well as many other solutions/modifications available in the marketplace. Some free, some with minimal cost. Also dependent on what version of c5 you are using.

thank you for your reply, what I would like to do is to dump files into a directory, so users can search for file names, not upload them from the front end. I have done this in the past writing a website from scratch using a php script to search through the files. I have tried all of the popular cms including this and none seem to be able to do it without using the inbuilt file up loader. \as you can imagine referencing 50,000 files in a database would be quite large. Can anyone confirm that this can/cant be done?