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All major operating systems running on computers can find files on the hard drive or other drives connected to the computer. Click one of the links below for help with finding files and apps on your computer or mobile device.
Windows 10
.mp4 = MPEG-4 movie files; See the file extension page for a complete listing of extensions. Find any files that contain help in the name. Type.help. in the search text field. The.help. indicates any file containing the word 'help' in the file name and the '.' indicates that the file can end with any extension. File can be encrypted with multiple public keys (presuming multiple people are allowed to access the file) if Alice wants to encrypt file so that only Bob can decrypt it she needs to ask Bob to send his public key and select only this key when encrypting file; One of the matching Private keys is required to decrypt (unlock) the file.
Microsoft Windows provides an easy-to-use search feature that helps you find any file on your computer, even if you don't know its full name. Whether you need to find a document, spreadsheet, picture, or video, the Windows search feature helps you find it. Choose the version of Windows on your computer in the list below and follow the steps to search for a file. Search examples and tips are also available by clicking the search tips link below.
- Press the Windows key, then type part or all the file name you want to find. See the search tips section for tips on searching for files.
- In the search results, click the Documents, Music, Photos, or Videos section header to view a list of files that meet the search criteria.
- Click the file name you want to open.
You can use the arrow keys to arrow up or down to the app, file, document, or setting you want to view and press Enter to open it.
Windows 8
- Press the Windows key to access the Windows Start screen.
- Start typing part of the file name you want to find. As you type results for your search will be shown. See the search tips section for tips on searching for files.
- Click the drop-down list above the Search text field and select the Files option.
- The search results are shown below the Search text field. Scroll down through the list of search results to find the file you are looking for, then click the file name to open it.
Windows Vista and Windows 7
- Click Start to open the Start menu.
- In the Search text field at the bottom of the Start menu, type part or all the file name you want to find. See the search tips section for tips on searching for files.
- In the search results, click the Documents or Files section header to view a list of files that meet the search criteria. You can also click the See more results link at the bottom of the search results to see a full list of files that meet the search criteria.
- Double-click the file you want to open.
Windows XP
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- Click Start to open the Start menu.
- In the Start menu, click the Search option.
- In the Search Results window, in the Search Companion section, fill out All or part of the file name field. See the search tips section for tips on searching for files.
- If the computer has more than one hard drive, or you want to search a USB flash drive or CD/DVD, click the Look indrop-down list and select the appropriate drive.
- Click the Search button to execute the search.
- Files meeting the search criteria are shown in the Search Results window. Double-click the file you want to open.
How to find a file using Windows Explorer
- Open Windows Explorer.
- In the left navigation pane, click on Computer or This PC.
- Near the top-right of Windows Explorer, click in the Search field and enter part or all the file name you want to find.
To find a file on a specific drive, click the drive under Computer or This PC in the left navigation pane. Then enter the file name you want to search for in the Search field.
iPad and iPhone
- Go to the home screen.
- Swipe from the left edge of the screen to the right edge of the screen.
- Type the file into the search bar at the top of the screen.
- Tap the Search button.
Android tablets and phones
- Open the Settings menu.
- Tap Storage.
- Tap Files or File manager.
- Navigate through the folders to find your desired file.
Search tips
Below are a few tips to help users find files on their computer.
Find all GIF picture files on the computer
Type *.gif In the search text field. The *.gif indicates any file that ends with a file extension of .gif. The .gif can be replaced with any file extension. Below are a few examples of the common extensions you may use.
- *.doc or *.docx = Microsoft Word documents
- *.xls or *.xlsx = Microsoft Excel documents
- *.jpg = Another image extension (JPEG pictures)
- *.htm and *.html = HTML web pages
- *.mp3 = MP3 music files
- *.mp4 = MPEG-4 movie files
See the file extension page for a complete listing of extensions.
Find any files that contain help in the name
Type *help*.* in the search text field. The *help* indicates any file containing the word 'help' in the file name and the '.*' indicates that the file can end with any extension.
Additional information, examples, and help with wildcards, as seen in the above examples, is available on our wildcard page.
Additional information
DocFetcher is an Open Source desktop search application: It allows you to search the contents of files on your computer. — You can think of it as Google for your local files. The application runs on Windows, Linux and OS X, and is made available under the Eclipse Public License.
The screenshot below shows the main user interface. Queries are entered in the text field at (1). The search results are displayed in the result pane at (2). The preview pane at (3) shows a text-only preview of the file currently selected in the result pane. All matches in the file are highlighted in yellow.
You can filter the results by minimum and/or maximum filesize (4), by file type (5) and by location (6). The buttons at (7) are used for opening the manual, opening the preferences and minimizing the program into the system tray, respectively.
DocFetcher requires that you create so-called indexes for the folders you want to search in. What indexing is and how it works is explained in more detail below. In a nutshell, an index allows DocFetcher to find out very quickly (in the order of milliseconds) which files contain a particular set of words, thereby vastly speeding up searches. The following screenshot shows DocFetcher's dialog for creating new indexes:
Clicking on the 'Run' button on the bottom right of this dialog starts the indexing. The indexing process can take a while, depending on the number and sizes of the files to be indexed. A good rule of thumb is 200 files per minute.
While creating an index takes time, it has to be done only once per folder. Also, updating an index after the folder's contents have changed is much faster than creating it — it usually takes only a couple of seconds.
- A portable version: There is a portable version of DocFetcher that runs on Windows, Linux and OS X. How this is useful is described in more detail further down this page.
- 64-bit support: Both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems are supported.
- Unicode support: DocFetcher comes with rock-solid Unicode support for all major formats, including Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, PDF, HTML, RTF and plain text files.
- Archive support: DocFetcher supports the following archive formats: zip, 7z, rar, and the whole tar.* family. The file extensions for zip archives can be customized, allowing you to add more zip-based archive formats as needed. Also, DocFetcher can handle an unlimited nesting of archives (e.g. a zip archive containing a 7z archive containing a rar archive.. and so on).
- Search in source code files: The file extensions by which DocFetcher recognizes plain text files can be customized, so you can use DocFetcher for searching in any kind of source code and other text-based file formats. (This works quite well in combination with the customizable zip extensions, e.g. for searching in Java source code inside Jar files.)
- Outlook PST files: DocFetcher allows searching for Outlook emails, which Microsoft Outlook typically stores in PST files.
- Detection of HTML pairs: By default, DocFetcher detects pairs of HTML files (e.g. a file named 'foo.html' and a folder named 'foo_files'), and treats the pair as a single document. This feature may seem rather useless at first, but it turned out that this dramatically increases the quality of the search results when you're dealing with HTML files, since all the 'clutter' inside the HTML folders disappears from the results.
- Regex-based exclusion of files from indexing: You can use regular expressions to exclude certain files from indexing. For example, to exclude Microsoft Excel files, you can use a regular expression like this:
.*.xls
- Mime-type detection: You can use regular expressions to turn on 'mime-type detection' for certain files, meaning that DocFetcher will try to detect their actual file types not just by looking at the filename, but also by peeking into the file contents. This comes in handy for files that have the wrong file extension.
- Powerful query syntax: In addition to basic constructs like
OR
,AND
andNOT
DocFetcher also supports, among other things: Wildcards, phrase search, fuzzy search ('find words that are similar to..'), proximity search ('these two words should be at most 10 words away from each other'), boosting ('increase the score of documents containing..')
- Microsoft Office (doc, xls, ppt)
- Microsoft Office 2007 and newer (docx, xlsx, pptx, docm, xlsm, pptm)
- Microsoft Outlook (pst)
- OpenOffice.org (odt, ods, odg, odp, ott, ots, otg, otp)
- Portable Document Format (pdf)
- EPUB (epub)
- HTML (html, xhtml, ..)
- TXT and other plain text formats (customizable)
- Rich Text Format (rtf)
- AbiWord (abw, abw.gz, zabw)
- Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (chm)
- MP3 Metadata (mp3)
- FLAC Metadata (flac)
- JPEG Exif Metadata (jpg, jpeg)
- Microsoft Visio (vsd)
- Scalable Vector Graphics (svg)
In comparison to other desktop search applications, here's where DocFetcher stands out:
Crap-free: We strive to keep DocFetcher's user interface clutter- and crap-free. No advertisement or 'would you like to register..?' popups. No useless stuff is installed in your web browser, registry or anywhere else in your system.
Get backup pro 3 3 2. Privacy: DocFetcher does not collect your private data. Ever. Anyone in doubt about this can check the publicly accessible source code.
Free forever: Since DocFetcher is Open Source, you don't have to worry about the program ever becoming obsolete and unsupported, because the source code will always be there for the taking. Speaking of support, have you gotten the news that Google Desktop, one of DocFetcher's major commercial competitors, was discontinued in 2011? Well..
Cross-platform: Unlike many of its competitors, DocFetcher does not only run on Windows, but also on Linux and OS X. Thus, if you ever feel like moving away from your Windows box and on to Linux or OS X, DocFetcher will be waiting for you on the other side.
Portable: One of DocFetcher's greatest strengths is its portability. Basically, with DocFetcher you can build up a complete, fully searchable document repository, and carry it around on your USB drive. More on that in the next section.
Indexing only what you need: Among DocFetcher's commercial competitors, there seems to be a tendency to nudge users towards indexing the entire hard drive — perhaps in an attempt to take away as many decisions as possible from supposedly 'dumb' users, or worse, in an attempt to harvest more user data. Download diskdrill enterprise 3 3. In practice though, it seems safe to assume that most people don't want to have their entire hard drive indexed: Not only is this a waste of indexing time and disk space, but it also clutters the search results with unwanted files. Hence, DocFetcher indexes only the folders you explicitly want to be indexed, and on top of that you're provided with a multitude of filtering options.
One of DocFetcher's outstanding features is that it is available as a portable version which allows you to create a portable document repository — a fully indexed and fully searchable repository of all your important documents that you can freely move around.
Usage examples Thumbtack 2 1. : There are all kinds of things you can do with such a repository: You can carry it with you on a USB drive, burn it onto a CD-ROM for archiving purposes, put it in an encrypted volume (recommended: TrueCrypt), synchronize it between multiple computers via a cloud storage service like DropBox, etc. Better yet, since DocFetcher is Open Source, you can even redistribute your repository: Upload it and share it with the rest of the world if you want.
Java: Performance and portability: One aspect some people might take issue with is that DocFetcher was written in Java, which has a reputation of being 'slow'. This was indeed true ten years ago, but since then Java's performance has seen much improvement, according to Wikipedia. Anyways, the great thing about being written in Java is that the very same portable DocFetcher package can be run on Windows, Linux and OS X — many other programs require using separate bundles for each platform. As a result, you can, for example, put your portable document repository on a USB drive and then access it from any of these operating systems, provided that a Java runtime is installed.
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This section tries to give a basic understanding of what indexing is and how it works.
The naive approach to file search: The most basic approach to file search is to simply visit every file in a certain location one-by-one whenever a search is performed. This works well enough for filename-only search, because analyzing filenames is very fast. However, it wouldn't work so well if you wanted to search the contents of files, since full text extraction is a much more expensive operation than filename analysis.
Index-based search: That's why DocFetcher, being a content searcher, takes an approach known as indexing: The basic idea is that most of the files people need to search in (like, more than 95%) are modified very infrequently or not at all. So, rather than doing full text extraction on every file on every search, it is far more efficient to perform text extraction on all files just once, and to create a so-called index from all the extracted text. This index is kind of like a dictionary that allows quickly looking up files by the words they contain.
Telephone book analogy: As an analogy, consider how much more efficient it is to look up someone's phone number in a telephone book (the 'index') instead of calling every possible phone number just to find out whether the person on the other end is the one you're looking for. — Calling someone over the phone and extracing text from a file can both be considered 'expensive operations'. Also, the fact that people don't change their phone numbers very frequently is analogous to the fact that most files on a computer are rarely if ever modified.
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Index updates: Of course, an index only reflects the state of the indexed files when it was created, not necessarily the latest state of the files. Thus, if the index isn't kept up-to-date, you could get outdated search results, much in the same way a telephone book can become out of date. However, this shouldn't be much of a problem if we can assume that most of the files are rarely modified. Additionally, DocFetcher is capable of automatically updating its indexes: (1) When it's running, it detects changed files and updates its indexes accordingly. (2) When it isn't running, a small daemon in the background will detect changes and keep a list of indexes to be updated; DocFetcher will then update those indexes the next time it is started. And don't you worry about the daemon: It has really low CPU usage and memory footprint, since it does nothing except noting which folders have changed, and leaves the more expensive index updates to DocFetcher.