Peer-to-peer networks are rather well-studied and currently there are numerous systems based on peer-to-peer principles running on the Internet. On the other hand peer-to-peer networks for mobile ad-hoc networks have attracted attention only in the recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel peer-to-peer file sharing system particularly designed for mobile ad-hoc networks. The proposed system, namely Wi-Share, has both network and application layer aspects enabling efficient search and download of the shared files. Wi-Share uses reactive routing for the search operation combined with source discovery and uses the routing tables constructed during the search operation for the download operation. In order to increase the overall efficiency of the file sharing in the network, Wi-Share applies techniques to reduce the required traffic and to increase efficient parallelism of the download operation. These techniques include filtering search results, preferring the higher quality routing paths, using partitioned download scheme and allowing the nodes that have joined to the network recently to contribute to the ongoing downloads. Wi-Share is implemented to work on mobile computers and the results of several experiments are also presented in the paper. © 2009 IEEE.