Searching and 'Feed to Listbox'

[00:02] (external link, opens in new tab) Let's talk about searching. One of the most common things you do with files is search. And Total Commander has a very nice searching ability. So let's say I want to search in this folder in C labs. All the CS files. So I'm going to say alt f7 for to start searching. And in the search dialogue, this is a general let's say everything.cs. Now I can also search inside archives or I can even find according to text. So all the CS files that have the world the the word class inside them.

[00:36] (external link, opens in new tab) I can even go a bit more advanced and say only files dated let's say in the last week or not older than one days or 1 hour etc. So that way if it's a specific file that I know changed in a specific time it's much easier to find. I can even find duplicate files of the same name and same size that match the specific pattern. I can also search inside plugins and plugins are a topic we'll get into later but basically they allow to extend the ability of Total Commander and we can load and save our searches if we keep doing the same search over and over again.

[01:19] (external link, opens in new tab) So this is just the beginning. If we just start to search, we can see that there's a bunch of files that we found. Now, we can't do a lot with these files. I could just view the file, for example, like this through the lister, which is the default viewer. But what if I want to do something with all these files? There's a special button here called feed to list box. So, if I click this button or if I press Alt L, I'm going to get the list of files.

[01:52] (external link, opens in new tab) Oops, sorry, pressed a different button. I'm going to get the list of files here. And because this is just a list of files now, what happens is that you see as I move up and down, the text in the bottom changes and I can see where this file is. But let's say I want to find all these files. I can now just select all of them. Ctrl+ A and maybe just zip all of them into the same into a specific folder on the left.

[02:22] (external link, opens in new tab) So, alt F5. So, by feeding to list list box, we have this ability to manage the search result and actually do something meaningful. For example, pressing Ctrl Q and seeing the content of each of these files. Or we could do multiple renames which we'll look about look at in in the next videos. So that's it. A very powerful search ability for Total Commander. If you know how to use that stuff, you are almost invincible.