The search is conducted. Make sure to be careful if you’re using wildcard searches to find and replace text. Keep an eye on the results in case something unexpected is found.

Some common wildcards are shown in the following table.

Search for Special Characters

You can also specifically search for special characters, such as line and page breaks, paragraph marks, fields, graphics, and dashes.

1. Click the Find list arrow.
2. Select Advanced Find.
3. Click the More button to expand the dialog box, if necessary.

If you’ve expanded the Find and Replace dialog box in a recent search, without collapsing it back down, it will open in an expanded state.

The Special menu lists the special formatting characters that can be searched for.

Select a special character.

When you select a special character from the menu, the text code for that special character is inserted.

Click the Find Next button.

The next instance of the selected special character is found.

You can find and replace one special character with another (to replace section breaks with page breaks, for example) on the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.

Windows 10 File Explorer Search Wildcard Characters Not Working

I am trying to locate filenames as I used to do so easily in Windows XP. I tried using simple wildcards, * (match any number of characters) and ? (match any character in a specific position), but these seem to have been deleted. Nothing fancy, these are just pretty universal wildcard characters that have been supported on various operating systems and even the on Internet for several decades.

Oh well, so I eventually found this link: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa965711%28v=vs.85%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

which explained the somewhat misnamed Advanced Query System or AQS.

Originally, met*.pdf failed to find the files I was seeking. Then, met *.pdf (note the placement of the space) only matched files that had a space before the string ‘met.’ You will note that met* should actually only match filenames that begin with «met,» but such fine distinctions are utterly lost on AQS.

According to AQS, if I’m up for more typing (instead of simply clicking a checkbox as I could before) and bin any notion of a wildcard character, I can type: filename:met ext:pdf. To be fair, I can also type name instead of filename. I get a sea of filenames containing «met»; but the desired files are still not found! It is finding some files in subdirectories—the All subfolders option being selected—but not the ones I seek and have confirmed are there.

I have tried using the pull-down Other Properties filter, but it is difficult to know what is selected, because no checkmarks are displayed next to your selection.

This has nothing to do with indexing, hidden files, or age of files — the files were created within the past 2 weeks on this very computer — and I have clicked every non-indexed option. These are not even system files, at least pdfs were not considered such under XP, but who knows with Windows 10?!

Searching just does not seem to work as one would expect it!

What on earth is going on? Prior to posting this, I checked a number of links to discover that this ‘advancement’ has been going on and complained about since Windows 7. Still no fixes by Windows 10. If it weren’t for fellow posters, I would feel like I was testing a Beta release or something. No, not that either, Windows just ran a rather lengthy Windows Update this morning.

Windows 10 File Explorer Search Wildcard Characters Not Working

I am trying to locate filenames as I used to do so easily in Windows XP. I tried using simple wildcards, * (match any number of characters) and ? (match any character in a specific position), but these seem to have been deleted. Nothing fancy, these are just pretty universal wildcard characters that have been supported on various operating systems and even the on Internet for several decades.

Oh well, so I eventually found this link: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa965711%28v=vs.85%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

which explained the somewhat misnamed Advanced Query System or AQS.

Originally, met*.pdf failed to find the files I was seeking. Then, met *.pdf (note the placement of the space) only matched files that had a space before the string ‘met.’ You will note that met* should actually only match filenames that begin with «met,» but such fine distinctions are utterly lost on AQS.

According to AQS, if I’m up for more typing (instead of simply clicking a checkbox as I could before) and bin any notion of a wildcard character, I can type: filename:met ext:pdf. To be fair, I can also type name instead of filename. I get a sea of filenames containing «met»; but the desired files are still not found! It is finding some files in subdirectories—the All subfolders option being selected—but not the ones I seek and have confirmed are there.

I have tried using the pull-down Other Properties filter, but it is difficult to know what is selected, because no checkmarks are displayed next to your selection.

This has nothing to do with indexing, hidden files, or age of files — the files were created within the past 2 weeks on this very computer — and I have clicked every non-indexed option. These are not even system files, at least pdfs were not considered such under XP, but who knows with Windows 10?!

Searching just does not seem to work as one would expect it!

What on earth is going on? Prior to posting this, I checked a number of links to discover that this ‘advancement’ has been going on and complained about since Windows 7. Still no fixes by Windows 10. If it weren’t for fellow posters, I would feel like I was testing a Beta release or something. No, not that either, Windows just ran a rather lengthy Windows Update this morning.

Can I use wildcards in Windows 8 search?

When using a new Windows 8 search bar:

What is the syntax of the search expression? Is it possible to use wildcards like «*», «?» or any other special symbol?

For example, when searching with Google i can use:

• ‘—‘ (minus) for excluding certain words;
• «quoted phrase» for exact phrase matching.

3 Answers 3

Windows 8 has a number of search features.

It supports two wildcards.

You can search by:

You can still search using the Advanced Query Syntax.

I recommend reading the article because there are a lot of features.

Here are some of the boolean operators:

I guess you should be able to use the same wildcard codes that were usable in Windows 7 since the «type to search» feature is nearly identical in both. Here’s a link that describes some of the codes. It describes wildcards and search codes.

An extract from the site

This option has been with us since the earliest days of DOS and Windows and consists of two wildcards: ‘?’ and ‘’ (without the single quote marks). The simplest explanation to what the two different wildcards do boils down to this: the ‘?’ means one character appears here and the ‘’ can stand for any number of characters – letters or numbers.

So if you are using the ‘?’ and you are searching for a file that you know part of the name of your query could look like this fo??t which would return any file that started with fr and ended with a ‘t’ but only had two unknown letters in the middle. In this case the file foxit could be one of the search results.

When using the ‘*’ as part of the search term it is best to use it either at the beginning of the word – it – or in the middle – ft – in either case the file named foxit would be returned as part of the results. As for using the ‘*’ wildcard at the end of the search term there isn’t much of a point because Windows search always acts like there is a wildcard at the end.

Search Codes

The one thing about the way I usually end up doing searches is that I typically end up with way more results than I really need. The way around this happening is to use search shortcuts – or codes – to further refine what you are searching for.

The simplest of these is the document types short codes. For example you are searching for a specific image but you forget its name but remember that it is a JPEG (jpg) image. In this case you can use the following short codes to refine your search

Search for a file with wildcards in the path using Windows command line

How can I search for files in the Windows command line, using wildcards like this?

fD\AppData\Local\*.txt) do echo %%

fF As for command line programs, the wildchar handling is up to the authors of that specific program. – David Ruhmann Dec 26 ’12 at 17:11

3 Answers 3

Windows PowerShell can do this easily.

If you want to include subfolders:

Regarding Hidden (etc.) files, Powershell’s help Get-ChildItem says:

By default, Get-ChildItem gets non-hidden items, but you can use the Directory, File, Hidden, ReadOnly, and System parameters to get only items with these attributes. To create a complex attribute search, use the Attributes parameter. If you use these parameters, Get-ChildItem gets only the items that meet all search conditions, as though the parameters were connected by an AND operator.

Any good Unix shell for Windows will do this.

For example, here’s a screenshot of my Hamilton C shell doing your example (sorry, no matches) and a couple others that do produce matches. The . wildcard used in the third example matches zero or more directory levels, whatever it takes for the rest of the pattern to match.

And here’s how you might do it with Cygwin bash . A few differences here because Cygwin follows Unix conventions: Paths are usually typed with forward slashes and the backslash is the escape character. Since Unix doesn’t understand drive letters, they’ve introduced a /cydrive/c notation to refer to the C: drive. As on Unix, wildcarding is case-sensitive. And while it supports the usual multiple directory level wildcarding you’d like, it doesn’t include the . I added to my shell. (Instead, you’d probably use find .)