Search for hidden files and folders in Windows 7

Thank you so much !! Personally I don't feel like i should have to jump through hoops just to do one little thing but apparently MS thinks we should. Just like they messed with my Hotmail interface with Outlook Express and I had to spend alot of time chasing down how to get my old interface back.......... ridonkulous!! Again thank you for the easy instructions :)

Good. Only one answer was valid here. Type attributes:34in the search field to find hidden files.

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And don't forget that attribute:34 is for HA.  It will only show you those with Hidden AND Archive.  You still won't see Hidden without Archive.

Windows 7 search is broken badly.  MS knows it and doesn't really care.

Good. Only one answer was valid here. Type attributes:34in the search field to find hidden files.

This leaves only two questions:

A. Where in God's name is the complete list of all these attributes that I can choose from?

B. Which less nice person(s) made up this incredibly user-unfriendly system?

I so want to be able to find folders with a certain name, but not all the millions of files with the same name. I tried the attribute folder: but that STILL spits out all the files with the same name too! I have movies which are chopped inseperate frames with a certain name. All these files contaminate my hunt for certain folders.

What can I do, to find folders with a certain name, and avoid finding matching files too?

A:  To the best of my knowledge it is undocumented.  If you search long enough you can find bits and pieces, but unless you spend many hours a day with searches, your effort will not be worth it.

B:  The same group that is going to give the world the Windows 8 experience, where a Server, the xbox and a Smartphone will share the same interface...  Ease of Use at it's best.  Microsoft has been doing this kind of thing a lot lately: basically taking tools that were easy for most users and splitting them into extremes.  One tool so basic as to be near useless to those who have used computers before.  The other so complicated (and undocumented) that even the most adept will give up and give in to the microsoft treatment.  Then when they use built in os tracking of features, no one will be using them and they can justify dropping them entirely.  They seem to be modeling themselves after Apple, except they can't quite get that intuitive or easy part down.

On a less sarcasm laden note, your best bet is to use third party software that works like search for XP.  I don't know of any offhand, but I think some were mentioned earlier in this thread, and they are mentioned quite often in similar threads throughtout the microsoft forums.  This is far from the first discussion of this topic.

You can use the kind property:

name:jack kind:folder

That would find and list folders whose name has jack as a word or start of a word.

About attributes, in Windows 7 Search it is unwieldy.  Here is a copy of my notes about it:

attributes:  Files and folders can have various defined “attributes”.  The most familiar attributes are those often listed in the Properties box (rightclick on a folder or file and click Properties):  Read-only, Hidden, and Archive.  The Read-only attribute, if showing a checkmark in Properties, means that the file can only be read from and not written to (changed).  The Hidden attribute means that the file is not ordinarily seen unless a Windows setting has been made so that hidden files are viewable.  The Archive attribute’s purpose was to flag files that had been created or changed more recently than the last time that a backup utility was run to copy the computer’s files, so that such software could quickly determine if it needed to copy the file.  Two other common attributes indicate if an item is a directory (folder) and if an item is a Windows system file.  These attributes have single letter abbreviations:  R, H, A, D, and S.  Windows 7 also gives attributes for being set to not have contents indexed (I), being compressed (C), and being encrypted (E), sometimes seen as options in Properties when an Advanced button is available for Attributes.  The recognized attribute of being compressed appears reserved for items that were compressed by Windows specifically, not for compressed items in general.

As mentioned earlier in these notes, Windows 7 can’t directly search for items by the letters that describe their attributes.  A simple way to work around the deficiency is to do a search using other desired properties, then set the results window to show the column named Attributes.  Move the mouse pointer to the column title Attributes and click the down-arrow button that appears at the right of the title.  Click to put checkmarks in the boxes at the left of the desired attributes and combinations of attributes in the list of choices that appears.

A more complicated way to search with the attributes property is to enter code numbers for the desired attribute or combination of attributes.  The code numbers for the individual attributes are powers of 2 since they are based on binary numbers.  In Windows 7, they are:  read-only (R) 1, hidden (H) 2, system (S) 4, directory (D) 16, archive (A) 32, encrypted (E) 64, normal (N) 128, temporary (T) 256, sparse file (P) 512, reparse point as with symbolic link or junction (L) 1024, compressed (C) 2048, offline (O) 4096, and not content indexed (I) 8192.  (Apparently the value 8 is reserved for future use, though I’ve seen it referred to as Volume or Device.)  However, the use of the numbers is not as easy as, for example, entering attributes:32 to get all files marked with the archive attribute, because most files will have more than one attribute, and their associated attribute number is a sum of the respective attribute numbers as listed earlier in this paragraph.  When I looked at the attribute combinations of the contents of a computer, there were 19 different combinations among the files and folders that had the archive attribute.  So, it is not practical to consider the attributes property as a useful search term unless only a specific combination (or a small number of specific combinations) was of interest.

Here is a list of the combinations of attributes that were present on the Windows 7 computer that I looked at, and the corresponding code numbers:  a (32), ac (2080), aci (10272), ai (8224), at (288), ati (8480), ci (10240), d (16), da (48), dai (8240), dc (2064), dci (10256), di (8208), h (2), ha (34), hai (8226), hd (18), hdi (8210), hs (6), hsa (38), hsai (8230), hsd (22), hsdi (8214), hsdli (9238), hsi (8198), i (8192), n (128), r (1), ra (33), rai (8225), rd (17), rdi (8209), rha (35), rhd (19), rhsa (39), rsa (37), rsd (21), rti (8449), sa (36), sai (8228), sd (20), sdi (8212), si (8196).  There were also items that were listed as Unspecified in the Attributes column of the search results window.  Such items can be searched for exclusively with attributes:[] (the square brackets are used to find items that have nothing set for the property).  The Unspecified files that I found appeared to be font files and browser cache items.