On 10/4/06, Chris Devers <[email protected]> wrote:
On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Joe Mahoney wrote:
It got a surprising amount of mileage out of that idea, including, among
other things, easy ways to search for things by arbitrary criteria,
because it new, for example, that an email file had attributes like
sender, date, and subject, while a song file had attributes like artist,
album, and genre. And, of course, you could organize or search by any of
these attributes, all right in the file browser.
Granted, modern OSes completely fail to be able to do this. Oh well.
Not true actually. XP does this, as does I think Win2003. Of course in
XP MS managed to screw the whole thing up (which is not to say that
they didnt scew up 2003, just that I havent checked) so that its worse
than useless, but....
On XP all searches done by the built in search tool use "search
handlers" to inspect a file. So if you have emails in a particular
format, and a handler is installed to search that format then XP can
do more intelligent searches. *Supposedly*
The problem is that if a given filetype doesn't have a search handler
then the stupid search mechansim doesnt default to a text search, it
defaults to skipping the file. And since there is hardly a plethora of
search handler implementation out there the end result is that the
fucking XP search function is totally fucking broken.
If you have XP and you a directory full of c code do a search for
files ending with .c/.h containing some string you know is there. Then
laugh your ass off when you realize that the fucking search program
doesnt find them. Then download something like agent-ransack
(http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/) and be happy that there is a
replacement (and one that works pretty nicely.)
Only Microsoft could fuck up a file search function this badly.
Hate.
Yves
ps: Of course it will search your Excel files and your Word documents,
and probably even your powerpoint presentations, but a plain old
fucking text c header file? Fuckers.
--
perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"
