Another annoyance

Do you know why New Jersey has more toxic waste sights than California has lawyers?

New Jersey had first choice. Mikek

And "How does that make you feel?" Mikek :-)

I didn't realize they were such a tourist attraction.

I spent way too much of my life (which is to say, a few weeks) in Trenton and Freehold. Yuk. Some of the stuff along the coast looked OK. We have a new customer in Monmouth, but we're encouraging them to come visit us.

On Sat, 11 Aug 2012 16:31:25 -0700, Jim Thompson [snippage]

Agent Ransack is a free program. For those that don't want an evil sounding name, they also have the same program named FileLocator Lite. Program can search file names and/or text in files. Also has boolean operations, regex support, and a host of other options to limit your search.

Win7 search function will miss things, so is totally unreliable. I thought reviewers were blowing smoke until I couldn't find a file I knew existed. A search using the command line found my file. Agent Ransack installed shortly thereafter.

Thanks, Mark! I'll check it out.

Any version of Windows Explorer seems to have that fault :-(

...Jim Thompson

(...)

I downloaded it, installed it, tried it, hated it, and uninstalled it. The problem was that it took many minutes to find anything. I had to wait for it to do a linear search through my approximately 200,000 files, trying to find one filename. I could have done it faster with: start -> run -> cmd cd / dir /s/b filename.ext

On the other foot, the program I recommended:

builds a database of all the file names, making searches almost instantaneous.

You do know that Windows ( at least in XP ) does a reasonable job of keyword searches ? I found this somewhat by accident. If you right-click on a file in Explorer, and select the Properties item, then click on the Summary tab, you can add keywords, category items, and other relevant info to the file.

The Windows search screen has the entry "a word or phrase in the file" Enter one of those keywords you inserted in the properties as above, and it will find it. Works even on non-text files, like schematic binaries, pictures, etc.

I have no idea where the keywords are stored, but it seems to work ok for me.

Interesting! I'll look into that. Thanks, Adrian! ...Jim Thompson

I just did a bit more playing around with this. Put some keywords into the Summary pages in several different sorts of binary files, including EasyPC sch and pcb files, and jpg images. Then both Windows search and the suggested Ransack search program also found the keywords. They are stored within the file itself, up in the header. Also tried with pdf files, but that did not work - boo!

I always knew you could put keywords in, but not that Windoze actually inserts them within the file ( at least in some file types ). And being able to search for them makes it really useful.

I just did a bit more playing around with this. Put some keywords into the Summary pages in several different sorts of binary files, including EasyPC sch and pcb files, and jpg images. Then both Windows search and the suggested Ransack search program also found the keywords. They are stored within the file itself, up in the header. Also tried with pdf files, but that did not work - boo!

I always knew you could put keywords in, but not that Windoze actually inserts them within the file ( at least in some file types ). And being able to search for them makes it really useful.

Correction: If he goes fast enough,he will CREATE the hurricane..

Hi Mark, Thanks for the tip. Just started really using Ransack today. It seems to get faster and faster the more I use it, so I'd guess it's doing some indexing. Works really well. Thanks again! ...Jim Thompson

I tried "Everything", but it does not search file contents, only file and folder names. My problem is finding a device model name _within_ who-knows-what library file name. ...Jim Thompson

Real techies use 'grep' for that. Comes free with boxtops, even for Windows--just install Cygwin, and then add c:\cygwin\bin to the PATH environment variable.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Agent Ransack seems to be working ducky. Looks like it "learns" your drive. After a couple of searches I went from minutes to seconds. ...Jim Thompson

That's true. I can usually remember some part of the file name or at least the sub-directory where I buried the file. If you can remember part of the filename, the big advantage is the very fast search (no waiting for indexing). However, if you need to search the contents, something else should be used. My problem with searching by content is that a typical search will generate a huge number of hits on my cluttered machine. The file may be in the output listing, but finding it in the listing is often tedious and difficult.

In Cygwin or Linux, it's something like:

grep -i "2N3904" $(locate *.lib)

"locate" also learns the layout of the disk--you set up a cron job to do "updatedb" at some convenient time when the machine is on and you aren't there.

This searches through all known .lib files for "2N3904" or "2n3904". Takes seconds, typically, and is free with boxtops.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs