I have a rather large source code repository on my machine; it is not indexed by Windows Search. I am trying to find some oddly-named generated files of the form .#name.extension.version where name and extension are normal names and extensions and version is a numeric value (e.g. something like 1.186). On Windows XP I could find these files by searching for .#*; on Windows 7 that just returns every single file and directory. So my question is this: is it possible to find files named like that using the built-in Windows 7 search functionality?
I did find this question which is very similar, but the answer doesn't work for me; it seems like any special character I put in the query is either ignored or treated as a wildcard, and as a result it matches every single file and directory.
Is there perhaps some registry value I can set to make the search-by-filename feature work with special characters?
Best Answer
Doh, I stumbled upon the answer after consulting the Advanced Query Syntax reference again. Searching for
filename:.#*gives me the XP search behavior.