Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> ...so how do you actually do this then?
> 
>> That's what the whole COM thing is all about, along with things like 
>> "Windows Scripting Host" and "Power Shell".
> 
>   I find it telling that if the question would have been something like
> "how do you find files in the current directory containing a certain string"
> the answer could have been given in one line,

Yes. Every window has a search box on it.

> but when the question is how
> to do those complex searches in Windows you mentioned... there's no simple
> answer, only obscure references to something else.

Nope. Every window has a search box in it, *and* that search box handles the 
complex file formats too. If all you want to do is search for a text string 
in a directory tree, Windows has that. If all you want to do is search for a 
regular expression in a directory tree, it's trivial to add that to Windows 
either with a GUI or without. If you want to know how to do searches that 
are difficult in Linux, then it's going to be complex in Windows too. I'm 
not going to teach you how to do that any more than you're going to explain 
how to write the same searches using Linux tools. If you want to do 
something complex beyond searching strings, you have to use the parsers. 
Unlike Linux, all the Windows tools are based on the same technology, so you 
only have to learn that once.

It's no different than saying "what if I wanted to count the number of times 
the Beatles show up in my music library" you'd have to ask where your music 
library is storing those tags. I'm not going to show you how to do that in 
Linux.

In other words, grep doesn't work on SQL databases. Simple string search is 
there. Complex structured queries are there. Regular expressions requires 
you download a free program, or to write a script that used the built-in 
regular expression objects and directory tree objects to walk the tree and 
regexp each file, because non-programmer users don't do that stuff.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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