File masks and regular expressions - Search My Network online help

Search My Network is a program to find files and folders on LAN servers or a hard drive of a desktop PC. You may download it here.

Online Help / Search parameters / File masks and regular expressions

Certain fields in Search My Network program require a mask or regular expression to be typed. For example, the second field of Search criteria pane (which is the main field for setting a search criteria) does so. In general, the following rules apply for all such fields in the program.

File mask is a standard way in Windows to set file and folder names. You may use two wildcards: ? for any character, or * for any number of any characters. Mask may contain several conditions separated by semicolon. For example, *.doc; pres*.ppt will find all files with doc extension and all ppt files starting with pres.

Advanced users may use Perl regular expressions instead of masks (PCRE by Philip Hazel is used). Just place slash / as first symbol in the field and immediately continue with a regexp, e.g. /^[a-z]+\.(mp3|avi)$. This regexp will match all mp3 and avi files that contain only letters from a to z in their names (no digits, hyphens, etc.). Note that the dot . symbol is backslashed as it has a special meaning in regular expressions, note also ^ and $ symbols - start and end of string markers. Regular expressions in Search My Network are case-insensitive. You may read more about regular expressions here.

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