The search criteria dialog box has four pages: General, Text file format, Filters and Regular expression lookup
The General page allows you to specify general search parameters:
Enter the string to locate in this box. This can contain Regular expressions if a normal search is specified. A history of previous strings is available by pressing the drop-down arrow.
In a normal search strings are matched exactly, and may contain regular expressions. In a soundex search, a sounds-like algorithm is used. See the discussion in the Search Assistant topic for more information. Quick searches are marginally quicker than normal searches, and allow searches without regular expression interpretation to be performed with ease. Quick searches are case-insensitive.
Available only when conducting normal searches, this controls whether matches must be whole words or whether they can be parts of words. Obviously searching for non-alphanumeric characters when specifying this option will not return the desired results.
Again, available only for normal searches, this controls whether matches have to match the case or the search string or not.
This option lets you display all lines in a file which don't contain the search string.
If you just want to find files containing matches but don't need to search the entire file, this option can be used to cause searching of a file to stop once the first match has been found.
Enter the file specification(s) to search here. These can be ambiguous or unambiguous. You can specify more than one by separating them with a space. To enter a specification that contains spaces, enclose it in double-quotes ("). For example:
*.* windows.* "My files.*"
A history of previously specified specifications can be recalled by pressing the drop-down button.
This option is useful if you elect to enter a file specification such as *.*, but wish to search binary files only.
This option is useful if you elect to enter a file specification such as *.*, but wish to search text files only. Note that you cannot set both 'Skip text files' and 'Skip binary files'
Check this option if you want Windows Grep to search in any zip files it encounters. Here is an example that illustrates how zip searching works:
Suppose you are searching *.txt files in c:\temp. If c:\temp contains any zip files, they will be examined to see if there are any *.txt files in them. If there are, they will be extracted to a temporary directory and searched. Files within zips will be shown as being in a directory such as c:\temp\myzip.zip in the file list.
Enter the folders to search in this box. You can specify more than one by separating them with a space. To enter a specification that contains spaces, enclose it in double-quotes ("). For example:
c:\ "c:\program files" c:\windows
If you are unsure where you want to search, press the … button to pick one from a list.
A history of previously specified folders can be recalled by pressing the drop-down button.
Checking this option will cause Windows Grep to search in all subfolders below the folders specified above.
Checking this option will cause Windows Grep to count the files to be searched before actually performing the search. This enables it to maintain a progress meter on the status bar during the search. Without counting first, the progress meter will be inactive. This option will slow down the search, perhaps considerably if you ask to search *.* on an entire hard disk.
This is useful if you run Windows Grep on a web server which hosts content authored by Microsoft Front Page which holds system information about each file in its subwebs in folders beginning with _vti_
The Text file format page provides facilities for searching at a field level within delimited or fixed width list files.
If you are searching any type of text file except files of this type, you should leave the text file format set to Normal
If you are searching delimited lists you can specify the field separator character and the field you wish to search.
If you are searching fixed-width lists you can specify the character column you with to search from, and the width of the field.
For an in-depth discussion of this functionality, see Searching lists
The Filters page provides fine control over the files that are searched. There are two types of filters: size and date.
You can choose to restrict the search to:
- Files that are less than a specified number of days old,
- files that are greater than a specified number of days old, or
- files whose date is between two dates.
This works on the last modified date. Future versions of Windows Grep may support file creation and file access date filtering.
You can choose to restrict the search to:
- Files that are less than a specified number of kilobytes in size,
- files that are greater than a specified number of kilobytes in size, or
- files whose size falls between two given sizes.