Meaning of "*" in Windows 7 Explorer Search?

Solution 1:

The Windows Help claims the behavior is the same as it is everywhere else in Windows:

But other users also noticed something is weird. Maybe it's a bug?

Or maybe * just means one or more.

Solution 2:

* and ? are called wildcards, and they originate from DOS. Here is a page explaining what they are for.

* matches any combination of characters and any number of characters (even none)

? matches exactly one character

I tried the searches on my machine, and I get these results:

• radio: all files found
• radio*: all files found
• *button: all files found
• *radiobutton*: all files found
• radiobutton*: all files found
• radiobutton: all files found
• radio*button: all files found

Solution 3:

I think we all established that * has always been the wildcard for 0 or more (or .* if you are using regular expressions). This is exactly what it is supposed to do, but there have been many times when this has not happened correcly for myself as well. I have found after restarting that the same searches worked correctly. This is probably due to the indexing service, as there have been reported problems with it and there's bound to be mistakes esp. at the rate in which M$ kicks out service packs and security updates.. My suggestion would be, stick with cmd.exe, thats what I do, then I don't have to worry about whether or not files are being left behind. I tried to reproduce your error but was unsuccessful, you might want to check the file attributes of the two files to make sure they arent marked system (which you wont see in the properties dialog) or hidden or have some other property preventing search from seeing it. But like i said, i cant seem to reproduce it.