Windows 7 search - you gotta be kidding me
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I'm a dinosaur. I admit it. I have large green scales and sharp teeth perfect for gnawing on anything that looks tasty. All of which is to say that like many others here, my initial MS experiences were with DOS. And I'm strangely at peace with that. Since olden times, the DOS based search parameters have been honored. Whether I type in a search box from Explorer in Windows or from the command line prompt, * is the wildcard for everything, ? is the wildcard for one character. And thus, *.ascx* will give you *.ascx, *.ascx.cs, *.ascx.designer.cs since the last * means "and everything else after this." Imagine my surprise when I do that search in Windows 7 and it gives me simply *.ascx. If I search for *.ascx.*, I get *.ascx.cs and *.ascx.designer.cs, but no .ascx files since they don't have the . at the end. Exclaiming WTF with some enthusiasm, I went to a command prompt where, sure enough, *.ascx* works just like it always did. Clearly, there's a moron at work here. Either I'm simply too stupid to understand how to use Search in the Explorer, or some rocket scientist at MS thought it would be good to have pattern matching work differently in the GUI than it does on the command line (and all previous versions of Windows). And so, I put it to the masses here (washed and otherwise) who know well my knack for personal stupidity: am I simply not smart enough to properly use search, or is MS as brain dead as I'm thinking to break something so fundamental to an OS as the ability to search for files? After all, given how long it took to do file copies in Vista, it's not like this kind of thing is unprecedented. Grrr. That's it. I'm gonna go find a lesser mammal and gnaw on it...
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesHow about just
.ascx? I think Windows now "pseudo"-includes the wildcards at the start and end. It appears to just run a string.Contains method on the filename... Works on my machine.
I doubt it. If it isn't intuitive then we need to fix it. - Chris Maunder
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I'm a dinosaur. I admit it. I have large green scales and sharp teeth perfect for gnawing on anything that looks tasty. All of which is to say that like many others here, my initial MS experiences were with DOS. And I'm strangely at peace with that. Since olden times, the DOS based search parameters have been honored. Whether I type in a search box from Explorer in Windows or from the command line prompt, * is the wildcard for everything, ? is the wildcard for one character. And thus, *.ascx* will give you *.ascx, *.ascx.cs, *.ascx.designer.cs since the last * means "and everything else after this." Imagine my surprise when I do that search in Windows 7 and it gives me simply *.ascx. If I search for *.ascx.*, I get *.ascx.cs and *.ascx.designer.cs, but no .ascx files since they don't have the . at the end. Exclaiming WTF with some enthusiasm, I went to a command prompt where, sure enough, *.ascx* works just like it always did. Clearly, there's a moron at work here. Either I'm simply too stupid to understand how to use Search in the Explorer, or some rocket scientist at MS thought it would be good to have pattern matching work differently in the GUI than it does on the command line (and all previous versions of Windows). And so, I put it to the masses here (washed and otherwise) who know well my knack for personal stupidity: am I simply not smart enough to properly use search, or is MS as brain dead as I'm thinking to break something so fundamental to an OS as the ability to search for files? After all, given how long it took to do file copies in Vista, it's not like this kind of thing is unprecedented. Grrr. That's it. I'm gonna go find a lesser mammal and gnaw on it...
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesI'm a dinosaur too; I search in a DOSbox. I didn't install Search and I know I've uninstalled it in the past. I certainly don't "index" my drives. X| I grew up with (Open)VMS so I'm used to good wildcards in directories. DOS was hosed, WinXP is a little better, but not much.
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I'm a dinosaur. I admit it. I have large green scales and sharp teeth perfect for gnawing on anything that looks tasty. All of which is to say that like many others here, my initial MS experiences were with DOS. And I'm strangely at peace with that. Since olden times, the DOS based search parameters have been honored. Whether I type in a search box from Explorer in Windows or from the command line prompt, * is the wildcard for everything, ? is the wildcard for one character. And thus, *.ascx* will give you *.ascx, *.ascx.cs, *.ascx.designer.cs since the last * means "and everything else after this." Imagine my surprise when I do that search in Windows 7 and it gives me simply *.ascx. If I search for *.ascx.*, I get *.ascx.cs and *.ascx.designer.cs, but no .ascx files since they don't have the . at the end. Exclaiming WTF with some enthusiasm, I went to a command prompt where, sure enough, *.ascx* works just like it always did. Clearly, there's a moron at work here. Either I'm simply too stupid to understand how to use Search in the Explorer, or some rocket scientist at MS thought it would be good to have pattern matching work differently in the GUI than it does on the command line (and all previous versions of Windows). And so, I put it to the masses here (washed and otherwise) who know well my knack for personal stupidity: am I simply not smart enough to properly use search, or is MS as brain dead as I'm thinking to break something so fundamental to an OS as the ability to search for files? After all, given how long it took to do file copies in Vista, it's not like this kind of thing is unprecedented. Grrr. That's it. I'm gonna go find a lesser mammal and gnaw on it...
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesIt's not a file-name search. It can search file-names, but it can also search attributes and content, and as others have noted you can trigger file-name searching by using certain operators, but if you leave them out then... it guesses. Note that "ascx", "*.ascx.*", and "name:*.ascx" (without quotes) should all give you what you're after...
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I'm a dinosaur. I admit it. I have large green scales and sharp teeth perfect for gnawing on anything that looks tasty. All of which is to say that like many others here, my initial MS experiences were with DOS. And I'm strangely at peace with that. Since olden times, the DOS based search parameters have been honored. Whether I type in a search box from Explorer in Windows or from the command line prompt, * is the wildcard for everything, ? is the wildcard for one character. And thus, *.ascx* will give you *.ascx, *.ascx.cs, *.ascx.designer.cs since the last * means "and everything else after this." Imagine my surprise when I do that search in Windows 7 and it gives me simply *.ascx. If I search for *.ascx.*, I get *.ascx.cs and *.ascx.designer.cs, but no .ascx files since they don't have the . at the end. Exclaiming WTF with some enthusiasm, I went to a command prompt where, sure enough, *.ascx* works just like it always did. Clearly, there's a moron at work here. Either I'm simply too stupid to understand how to use Search in the Explorer, or some rocket scientist at MS thought it would be good to have pattern matching work differently in the GUI than it does on the command line (and all previous versions of Windows). And so, I put it to the masses here (washed and otherwise) who know well my knack for personal stupidity: am I simply not smart enough to properly use search, or is MS as brain dead as I'm thinking to break something so fundamental to an OS as the ability to search for files? After all, given how long it took to do file copies in Vista, it's not like this kind of thing is unprecedented. Grrr. That's it. I'm gonna go find a lesser mammal and gnaw on it...
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesIMHO search is broken since Windows XP SP2!
A train station is where the train stops. A bus station is where the bus stops. On my desk, I have a work station.... _________________________________________________________ My programs never have bugs, they just develop random features.
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Christian Graus wrote:
Loving my new iPad right now...
Seriously, what is your take on that? It seemed to me like a glorified iPod Touch. I know the screen is a lot larger, but what other advantages are there? It seemed like it does a lot less than some Netbooks from some of the things that have read about it. I am not bashing you or it; I am seriously interested in why you like it... Peace :rose:
WE ARE DYSLEXIC OF BORG. Refutance is systile. Your a$$ will be laminated. There are 10 kinds of people in the world: People who know binary and people who don't.
It is precisely that. It's not a netbook, it does a lot less. For me, it's just very slick, and a great device for storing photos and media. If I didn't want one to learn to program it, I doubt I'd have bought one. However, having one, I can see it's place. It will not replace my MacBook Pro, or even my cheap PC laptops. But, it will be what I use to browse my photos, play some games, browse the web while watching TV, etc. I think that Apple has overcontrolled this in some ways with the app store, but I've only recently started to appreciate how having a defined place to buy apps instantly is really cool, and leads to people buying a lot of really cheap software. I buy quite a few $2 games nowadays, and I love them for a quick bit of fun.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
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Loving my new iPad right now...
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
Eww... I did not need that picture in my head, man.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Nope. Haven't cared for the overhead of the indexers in the past so I tend to avoid them. Of course, there's always the old standby: cmd. :)
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesThe win7 indexer is actually smart enough to only run when you're not not using the computer. The XP version always ended up curbstomped within a few weeks for stopping me from being able to work; it was as bad as diskkeeper X| in that regard. The win7 one I've never noticed running at all.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
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I'm a dinosaur. I admit it. I have large green scales and sharp teeth perfect for gnawing on anything that looks tasty. All of which is to say that like many others here, my initial MS experiences were with DOS. And I'm strangely at peace with that. Since olden times, the DOS based search parameters have been honored. Whether I type in a search box from Explorer in Windows or from the command line prompt, * is the wildcard for everything, ? is the wildcard for one character. And thus, *.ascx* will give you *.ascx, *.ascx.cs, *.ascx.designer.cs since the last * means "and everything else after this." Imagine my surprise when I do that search in Windows 7 and it gives me simply *.ascx. If I search for *.ascx.*, I get *.ascx.cs and *.ascx.designer.cs, but no .ascx files since they don't have the . at the end. Exclaiming WTF with some enthusiasm, I went to a command prompt where, sure enough, *.ascx* works just like it always did. Clearly, there's a moron at work here. Either I'm simply too stupid to understand how to use Search in the Explorer, or some rocket scientist at MS thought it would be good to have pattern matching work differently in the GUI than it does on the command line (and all previous versions of Windows). And so, I put it to the masses here (washed and otherwise) who know well my knack for personal stupidity: am I simply not smart enough to properly use search, or is MS as brain dead as I'm thinking to break something so fundamental to an OS as the ability to search for files? After all, given how long it took to do file copies in Vista, it's not like this kind of thing is unprecedented. Grrr. That's it. I'm gonna go find a lesser mammal and gnaw on it...
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesHmmmm....although I too am a dinosaur, my Win 7 machine finds all the .ascx files in my libraries in just a couple of milliseconds...simply by typing *.ascx in the search window. Typing *.as? finds all the .aspx, .asmx, and .asax files just like it should with the "?" wildcard. The difference in my results vs yours is possibly because I do have indexing enabled. I've not noticed any performance hit from enabling indexing on this machine though I certainly noticed it on my old XP box. I'm not sure if it's because Win 7's indexing is more efficient than XP's or because this machine has a fairly fast I7-860 CPU with eight logical cores.
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I'm a dinosaur. I admit it. I have large green scales and sharp teeth perfect for gnawing on anything that looks tasty. All of which is to say that like many others here, my initial MS experiences were with DOS. And I'm strangely at peace with that. Since olden times, the DOS based search parameters have been honored. Whether I type in a search box from Explorer in Windows or from the command line prompt, * is the wildcard for everything, ? is the wildcard for one character. And thus, *.ascx* will give you *.ascx, *.ascx.cs, *.ascx.designer.cs since the last * means "and everything else after this." Imagine my surprise when I do that search in Windows 7 and it gives me simply *.ascx. If I search for *.ascx.*, I get *.ascx.cs and *.ascx.designer.cs, but no .ascx files since they don't have the . at the end. Exclaiming WTF with some enthusiasm, I went to a command prompt where, sure enough, *.ascx* works just like it always did. Clearly, there's a moron at work here. Either I'm simply too stupid to understand how to use Search in the Explorer, or some rocket scientist at MS thought it would be good to have pattern matching work differently in the GUI than it does on the command line (and all previous versions of Windows). And so, I put it to the masses here (washed and otherwise) who know well my knack for personal stupidity: am I simply not smart enough to properly use search, or is MS as brain dead as I'm thinking to break something so fundamental to an OS as the ability to search for files? After all, given how long it took to do file copies in Vista, it's not like this kind of thing is unprecedented. Grrr. That's it. I'm gonna go find a lesser mammal and gnaw on it...
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesYou said you typed in *.ascx.* in the Windows search, vs. *.ascx* in the command line. I don't expect the outputs to be identical when the search criteria are different...
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I'm a dinosaur. I admit it. I have large green scales and sharp teeth perfect for gnawing on anything that looks tasty. All of which is to say that like many others here, my initial MS experiences were with DOS. And I'm strangely at peace with that. Since olden times, the DOS based search parameters have been honored. Whether I type in a search box from Explorer in Windows or from the command line prompt, * is the wildcard for everything, ? is the wildcard for one character. And thus, *.ascx* will give you *.ascx, *.ascx.cs, *.ascx.designer.cs since the last * means "and everything else after this." Imagine my surprise when I do that search in Windows 7 and it gives me simply *.ascx. If I search for *.ascx.*, I get *.ascx.cs and *.ascx.designer.cs, but no .ascx files since they don't have the . at the end. Exclaiming WTF with some enthusiasm, I went to a command prompt where, sure enough, *.ascx* works just like it always did. Clearly, there's a moron at work here. Either I'm simply too stupid to understand how to use Search in the Explorer, or some rocket scientist at MS thought it would be good to have pattern matching work differently in the GUI than it does on the command line (and all previous versions of Windows). And so, I put it to the masses here (washed and otherwise) who know well my knack for personal stupidity: am I simply not smart enough to properly use search, or is MS as brain dead as I'm thinking to break something so fundamental to an OS as the ability to search for files? After all, given how long it took to do file copies in Vista, it's not like this kind of thing is unprecedented. Grrr. That's it. I'm gonna go find a lesser mammal and gnaw on it...
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesI do like how they added search to a lot of the system screens in 7, like Control Panel, Start Menu etc. but for a serious search, I'd never bother with Windows anyway. I use SearchEverything for file searches, and FileSeek for file contents search. Both let you use regex instead of just wildcards, and they're surprisingly fast. FileSeek will even let you specify one regex for the filenames, and then another regex to search the contents of that result set. And it's free.
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I'm a dinosaur. I admit it. I have large green scales and sharp teeth perfect for gnawing on anything that looks tasty. All of which is to say that like many others here, my initial MS experiences were with DOS. And I'm strangely at peace with that. Since olden times, the DOS based search parameters have been honored. Whether I type in a search box from Explorer in Windows or from the command line prompt, * is the wildcard for everything, ? is the wildcard for one character. And thus, *.ascx* will give you *.ascx, *.ascx.cs, *.ascx.designer.cs since the last * means "and everything else after this." Imagine my surprise when I do that search in Windows 7 and it gives me simply *.ascx. If I search for *.ascx.*, I get *.ascx.cs and *.ascx.designer.cs, but no .ascx files since they don't have the . at the end. Exclaiming WTF with some enthusiasm, I went to a command prompt where, sure enough, *.ascx* works just like it always did. Clearly, there's a moron at work here. Either I'm simply too stupid to understand how to use Search in the Explorer, or some rocket scientist at MS thought it would be good to have pattern matching work differently in the GUI than it does on the command line (and all previous versions of Windows). And so, I put it to the masses here (washed and otherwise) who know well my knack for personal stupidity: am I simply not smart enough to properly use search, or is MS as brain dead as I'm thinking to break something so fundamental to an OS as the ability to search for files? After all, given how long it took to do file copies in Vista, it's not like this kind of thing is unprecedented. Grrr. That's it. I'm gonna go find a lesser mammal and gnaw on it...
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
It is precisely that. It's not a netbook, it does a lot less. For me, it's just very slick, and a great device for storing photos and media. If I didn't want one to learn to program it, I doubt I'd have bought one. However, having one, I can see it's place. It will not replace my MacBook Pro, or even my cheap PC laptops. But, it will be what I use to browse my photos, play some games, browse the web while watching TV, etc. I think that Apple has overcontrolled this in some ways with the app store, but I've only recently started to appreciate how having a defined place to buy apps instantly is really cool, and leads to people buying a lot of really cheap software. I buy quite a few $2 games nowadays, and I love them for a quick bit of fun.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
Thanks for the feedback Christian. I can see where you're coming from, but I doubt I can justify one for my own use. I really do like my son's iPod Touch, so maybe someday if the price comes down a little... :)
WE ARE DYSLEXIC OF BORG. Refutance is systile. Your a$$ will be laminated. There are 10 kinds of people in the world: People who know binary and people who don't.
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I have never much liked Windows search. In fact, I created my own regex search utility so I could avoid using it. The thing that really annoys me is that it ignores some file types. You can fix that in a round about way, but it's way too dumbed down for my taste. I guess they just assume users would get overwhelmed with all those fancy looking settings.
Once windows started searching ZIP files as if they were folders, that forced me back to the command line prompt, and I was glad that the command line worked differently! Also, the windows search will not search files that are open, even if they are opened in shared read mode. Bogus.
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try name:"*.ascx*"