Re: search subdirectories

[Michael Norman michael.norman@xxxxxxxx]

Judith Davidsen writes
> For instance, I want to find Dilmaghani in the directory NYT
> and all NYT's subdirectories. The dialog box in Powerdesk is
> the same as the dialog box in explorer, and both give me the
> names of 23 files. In both Powerdesk and Explorer I then
> have to open each and every one of those 23 files (in
> Wordpad) and conduct an individual search for dilmaghani in
> every one of them. When I'm working there is no time to
> manually search 23 files whenever I need to double check a
> name or an address or a phone number or a spelling or piece
> of tech info or whether someone died so maybe I shouldn't
> ask to speak to him.
Actually Judith, PowerDesk (paid edition) has a view pane, a button, which
opens the file in the bottom half of the search window (even in the file
finder dialog box) as you highlight each file in the list, and if all you
want to do is see the information in the files you have pulled up with the
search, it's the thing for you. I think you can also clip and paste (to
Win's clipboard) the info talked about above. There is another, more
expensive alternative, dtSearch, an indexing program very useful in
retrieving information. I work with long interview transcripts. On my first
project years ago I used XyDos's fast search, then cut and pasted between
windows. This time we are experimenting with dtSearch's (text indexing)
ability to pull the highlighted word and any number of words or graphs on
either side of it and put it all in one file (a report, they call it) which
can be opened in MSWord or in our favorite ASCII WP. If you save the report
to the Windows clipboard and use the Rexx solution Carl and Bob have talked
about, you can go, jerry-rigged, between the two programs. It sounds clunky
but works fine, though certainly is not as clean and elegant as working
from within XyDos for the whole thing, but I don't think that's
possible...at this point.

Michael Norman