How to index/find files seperated by a period "."

Hey guys,

I have another ravishing question for you. I have many (and I mean many) files where the words within the filename are separated not by spaces but rather by periods.

Example:
My.Summer.Vacation.mkv

This is because my family uploads movies and other content on sites like Rapidshare and Hotfile, in which the filename cannot contain spaces. Therefore people use periods to separate the words of a given file.

My question is the following, is there a way to index my hard drives using either Windows 7 search or even Google Desktop in order to return a search result for the word "vacation" in my above example. At the moment it does not return a result since the word vacation is not separated by spaces.

As per my usual etiquette, if anyone helps me figure this out, I will post images of how to do so in the replies section of this posts.

I have tried using Search Everything but I'd really like to continue to have the search functionality in the start menu and within folders.

I've also tried searching for *vacation* and this seems to work for some files, but not for others. I'm not quite sure why.

Thanks for any input

You mean, does it find anything when you have indexed the drive, or do you want to know how to index a drive?

*vacation* works because it basicly tells the computer to search for somethingvacationsomething. Have you tried combinations like "*.vacation.*"

Everything definitly works better and faster but I agree launching it quickly can be a pain.

whenever you are faced with file names that cannot contain spaces, it is always recommended to use the underscore "_" instead of the period "."

Just me 2 cents.

As long as the text you are search for is wrapped by a set of quots, there is no reason why you should be having troubles. I use periods spaces underscores and a number of other characters.

With filenames, the name of the file is the text before the last period and the extension(file type if you will) is the text after the last period.

• If you search for "*.jpg" your results will be all files ending with .jpg's
• If you search for "*.*a" your results will be all files ending with a
• If you search for "b*.*" your results will be all files starting with b
• If you search for "*c.*" your results will be all files with c before the period (any period within the filename)
• If you search for "*.d*" your results will be all files with d before the period (any period within the filename)

Alright thanks for the input guys, its still not working...I'll try re-indexing maybe that'll do the trick

In windows explorer, you might click Organize and select folder & search options. Under the search tab ...

What to search:
At the top I use "In Indexed locations ... In non-indexed just search filenames" -based on what you said it IS a filename you are trying to find so the first setting should work and will be faster than the second.

How to search:
check include subfolders
check find partial matches - this is important, otherwise your search needs to be "*vacation*"

When searching non-indexed:
check Include compressed files if you want it to find them in zips etc


You can also go to control panel\indexing options to choose where windows indexes and where it doesn't. Indexing can speed up searches and will limit matches to filenames only if the first setting mentioned above is used.