Can't get boolean operators to work

Miscellaneous Needful things
1

Hi,

I’m using EasyFind 4.9. I can’t seem to get the boolean operators to work, despite reading the documentation and this forums and trying many variations. I’ve chosen “Unix-Wildcard”. If I have the file:


John at home.jpg

The following search terms work to find the file:

John*
*.jpg

However, the following search terms do not find the file, though I believe they should: ```
NOT .tiff
John NOT *.tiff


How can I find the file "John at home.jpg" but not "John at home.tiff"? As far as I can tell, EasyFind is treating the boolean operators as a normal part of the search term (looking for the word "not").

Thanks,
Jolin
2

The “Unix-Wildcards” option doesn’t support operators, only the “Boolean & Wildcards” does but it’s only available in combination with the “File Contents” option.

3

Thanks for clearing that up Christian. It’s a shame as booleans would be a very useful feature on file name searches! But can I suggest the help clarifies that boolean only applies to file contents? I misinterpreted the following entry in the help section on Search Options:


The Boolean & Wildcards option is renamed to UNIX Wildcards and operators are the options Ignore Umlauts and Fuzzy are not available when searching for file/folder names.

I thought it meant that a recent release had renamed the Boolean & Wildcards option to ‘Unix Wildcards’ (and that therefore boolean operators should work with the Unix Wildcards option). Understanding that boolean only works with file contents would have saved me a couple hours of trying to get it to work!

4

In the past EasyFind used operators & wildcards in this case too but most people seem to prefer simple wildcards (like *.jpg) applied to the complete name.

Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll forward this.

5

BTW:
Wildcards support exclusion of characters too, e.g. [^a-z]* returns all files not beginning with a character.

6

Thanks. I did try something along those lines ("*.[^t][^i][^f][^f]"), but the search I need is actually a bit more complicated than my original example as I’m trying to find all files that don’t have “.tiff”, “.tif”, “.jpeg”, or “.jpg” filename extensions. But for simpler searches in the future, I’m sure EasyFind will come in useful.

7

Depending on the intended usage of the results, maybe you could sort the results by kind?