Why Windows is shit today

[kingandy]

http://www.pcplus.co.uk/tips/default.asp?pagetypeid=2&articleid=5870&subsectionid=390

The "Containing Text" field of the built-in Windows XP search system only works on extensions it recognises^[1]. Unless you tell it to search everything, which is an option hidden in the File Indexing service - which doesn't even have to be turned on, but the option has to be set inside it anyway.

I mean, what the fuck.

[1] In theory this is so that the system doesn't waste your time, say, looking through image files for some text. Of course any reasonable person would tell it "don't search these files" rather than "only search these other files". Quite apart from the fact that there are people out there who genuinely want to search through image files for specific characters, it's annoying because apparently ASP and PHP aren't on the list of approved file types. Because whoever would want to look for text inside one of those?

Comments

Re: Extensions suck...

[stsquad.livejournal.com]

Which of course makes searching all files which contain text an easy* case of:

find ~/mysrc/ -xtype f | xargs file | grep "text" | perl -ne 'm/(.*):/; print "$1\n";' | xargs grep "what I look for"

*easy being by definition, didn't need to think hard about that, rather than looks pretty on the screen.