The search assistant will guide you through the process of entering the information required to perform a search.
As you work through the assistant, you will be asked four questions:
Enter the text string that you want to locate in this box. This can be any combination of characters you like, including accented and other 'extended' characters. Some characters have a special meaning when performing a 'normal' search (The type of search you want to do is asked next). These are used to specify regular expressions. See the Regular expressions topic for more information.
Windows Grep supports three types of search, Normal, Soundex and Quick. Normal searches are just as they sound - text strings will be matched exactly, and regular expressions are supported. Soundex searches allow you to find words that sound like the one you specify. This is particularly useful for finding names which may have a variation in the spelling, such as Smith and Smythe or Robin, Robyn, Robbin, Rhobbyne and so on. The algorithm is not foolproof, however, so you may be surprised by some matches returned. Quick searches are marginally quicker that normal searches but do not support regular expressions or other options.
You can also elect to Match case and find Whole words only. These options do exactly as their name suggests, and are only available when performing normal searches. By definition, soundex works at a word-level.
Windows Grep can search entire hard disks or in particular folders. Navigate through the folders on the left-hand-side of the Assistant until you find the one you want to search, then press the > key to add it to the list of folders to search. You can specify more than one folder to search, and remove folders from the list to search by pressing the < button. Windows Grep can search in all folders within the selected folders by selecting the Search in subfolders option. For example, to search an entire hard disk, add c:\ to the list and select Search in subfolders.
Finally, the type of files that are searched can be specified. The left-hand list displays extensions of files that you may wish to include in your search. Select one from the list, then click on the > button to have files of that extension searched. If the type of files you want to search are not included in the list, you can enter a custom file specification in the box provided and add it to the include list. This specification can include normal DOS wildcard characters * and ? so can be ambiguous or unambiguous - i.e. can refer to multiple files (*.*) or a single file (myfile.txt).
Note that if you include overlapping file specifications, such as *.* and *.txt, files may be searched more than once. In this example, files of extension *.txt will be searched twice.