Windows – How to easily find files with no extension using Windows

cmd.exefile extensionpowershellsearchwindows-explorer

I have some files on my Hard Disk Drive that have no extensions whatsoever. It is very hard to find them manually, I really don't like the fact that I would need to replace my mouse sooner because of the not vast, but yet very prominent damage, done to the hardware from trying to find those files by constantly clicking and scrolling, since they are a few hundred files out of thousands in a single folder.

Does anyone here know of a cmd or PowerShell command, or some Windows Explorer search advanced query syntax to help simplify this task?

Best Answer

Finding Files with No File Extensions with Windows

Windows Explorer - Advanced Query Syntax

As per PetSerAl here are some of the File Explorer Advanced Query Syntax method to start with but read further down for the equivalent Command Line and Batch Script methods for this task.

Recursive Search

kind:= -folder type:= -[] extension:= []

Non-Recursive

Just select the "Current Folder" option thru the GUI "Search" tab

kind:= -folder type:= -[] extension:= [] folder:"C:\folder\path"

You can use a for /f loop iterating the output of a dir command with the /B and /A-D parameters, and then use some conditional if logic to only output files without any extensions using substitutions for the iterated files in the specified directory.

Command Line

Note: This assumes the directory you are in on the command line is the directory you are needing to search to display the files without extensions.

FOR /F "TOKENS=*" %A IN ('dir /B * /A-D') DO IF /I [%~nxA]==[%~nA] ECHO %~A

Batch Script

Note: This is a batch script that you set the SET Src= value to be the directory which you need to search to display files without extensions.

@ECHO ON
SET Src=C:\folder\path
FOR /F "TOKENS=*" %%A IN ('DIR /B "%Src%\*" /A-D') DO IF /I [%%~nxA]==[%%~nA] ECHO %%~A
PAUSE
EXIT

Further Resources

For /F
FOR /?
In addition, substitution of FOR variable references has been enhanced. You can now use the following optional syntax:
```
%~nI        - expands %I to a file name only
%~xI        - expands %I to a file extension only
```
Dir
If

Related Solutions

Windows – Way to search & find Files or Folders with no Extension in Windows

I was facing this issue today on Windows 8 and have noticed it on previously on Windows 7 as well. I finally found a way to do this right and I hope this answer helps the original posters and others who come here via google searches.

Typically for normal as well as advanced power searches I used Nirsoft SearchMyFiles and stopped using Windows Search.

But, for some reason I was having trouble getting it to find files without any extensions. I figured the same bug was there in this app as well.

But, I was wrong and apparently Nir Softer has redesigned his wild card & regular expression engine from scratch; as per this little gem I found posted on the page in "Versions History" section:

Version 2.40:

SearchMyFiles now uses an internal wildcard parser instead of basing the search result on the wildcard parser of Windows. This change solves an annoying bug caused by Windows wildcard parser: In previous versions, SearchMyFiles sometimes returned incorrect results, because Windows also matches the wildcard with the short filename (8.3 DOS format).

Notice: The new wildcard parser may cause some compatibility issues, for example: When you scanned using . wildcard with Windows parser, it returned all files, including files without extension. With the new SearchMyFiles wildcard parser, . returns only files with extension. In order to return all files, you should use * instead of .

When loading old config files, SearchMyFiles automatically converts all . wildcards to *

The new wildcard parser has some advantages, for example: if you search for ..., you'll get all files with 3 dot characters or more. With Windows wildcard parser in previous versions, you simply got the list of all files.

You can now exclude files by using wildcards list. You have to select this option from the combo-box, because the default option is to exclude files by extension.

You can now specify environment strings in the 'Base Folders' and 'Excluded Folders' fields (For example: %AppData% )

So to find files without extensions don't use these:

*.* or *.

Just use a simple:

For example :

Files Wildcard: *
Subfolders Wildcard: * 
File Size: At most: 4 KB / 4096 Bytes

Note: Please don't go by the wild cards shown in the 'old' screenshot posted above.

Automatically Hide Files with Certain Extensions in Windows

You can create a program (possibly running as a service) that will monitor changes in a given directory. Then, whenever it recognizes a change, it can decide whether to make that file hidden or not. See Obtaining Directory Change Notifications.

Making a file hidden is quite simple - just use SetFileAttribute.