wildcards should work with the search feature

Bug #41704 reported by jedie
134
This bug affects 19 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Nautilus
Fix Released
Wishlist
nautilus (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

I get no results when i search on NTFS with nautilus. My search term: "win*.dll"

If i search on the terminal i find a few files with:

   /media/sda1/WIN$ find . -name win*.dll

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

Thanks for your bug. Do you have beagle installed?

Changed in nautilus:
assignee: nobody → desktop-bugs
status: Unconfirmed → Needs Info
Revision history for this message
jedie (launchpad-net-jensdiemer) wrote :

So, i have beagle not installed. Should i do this?

I have only the "libbeagle0" installed

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

No, no need to install it, that was to known what mode you use. Does anybody has a ntfs partition to try that?

Changed in nautilus:
status: Needs Info → Unconfirmed
Revision history for this message
jedie (launchpad-net-jensdiemer) wrote :

Hm. I'm sorry. It has to do nothing with NTFS.
It's a generally problem. I don't understand the search engine in nautilus, i think :(

I search after "py" and i see many dirs & files... If i now change the search term to "*.py" there are no results. (empty list)
With ".py" there are files found... Is the starlet not supported?

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

Right, that feature doesn't use the wildcard, I've forwarded your issue upstream: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=340332

Changed in nautilus:
status: Unconfirmed → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
John Leach (johnleach) wrote :

This seems to be fixed. I can search using wildcards on Edgy and get results. It's still marked as unconfirmed on the Gnome Bugzilla.

Jedie, can you confirm this?

Revision history for this message
Øyvind Stegard (oyvindstegard) wrote :

I can't get any results at all when searching with wildcards in Nautilus in Ubuntu Feisty .. I don't use Beagle or any other file content indexer. Just slocate.

Query text: *.txt
Criterium: Location -> /home

Zaroo results. Isn't this search feature supposed to support wildcards ? If not, that's really horrible.

Using find on the command line works a lot better.

Revision history for this message
Ari (ari-reads) wrote :

it appears the same issue is the cause of the following weirdness:

an "*mp3" search string works fine in Places > "Search for Files", but it
doesn't work at all in the integrated nautilus search.

Quite confusing for people coming from Windows (and for me as well! :)

Revision history for this message
antonioni (antonioni-rocha) wrote :

Let's correct it...

Changed in nautilus:
status: Confirmed → Triaged
Revision history for this message
Rüdiger Kupper (ruediger.kupper) wrote :

Would this qualify as a papercut? People pressing the "search" button in nautilus surely expect a wildcard search? At least, I did ;). And I was very annoyed it didn't work.

Revision history for this message
jpka (jopka) wrote :

It's really strange. If inline search not work with de-facto usual standards (as wildcards, etc), maybe replace appearing of search line, by appearing of fully functional 'Places -> Search for files' applet?

Changed in nautilus:
importance: Unknown → Wishlist
Revision history for this message
Mistere-here (mistere-here) wrote :

simply searching for a partial filename without a wildcard has the desired result I think.
I was trying to collect all the screenshots off of my desktop and found that simply searching for "screenshot" found all similar files. However, the wildcards would give you more control.

Revision history for this message
anatoly techtonik (techtonik) wrote :

That's not a wishlist. Search should support commonly used wildcards.

Changed in nautilus (Ubuntu):
status: Triaged → New
Revision history for this message
anatoly techtonik (techtonik) wrote :

If nautilus doesn't support de-fact standard for searching filesystems, it should at least warn user when user attempts to use wildcard (and collect stats if you don't believe many need this).

Revision history for this message
Vadim Rutkovsky (roignac) wrote :

Still reproducible in nautilus 3.3.90.

Changed in nautilus (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Changed in nautilus:
status: New → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

the issue should be fixed with nautilus 3.6 in raring, closing the bug

Changed in nautilus (Ubuntu):
assignee: Ubuntu Desktop Bugs (desktop-bugs) → nobody
status: Confirmed → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
Tim Fisken (tim2) wrote :

I'm still experiencing this with nautilus 3.6 (specifically, package 1:3.6.3-0ubuntu16 on 13.04).

Revision history for this message
Sathish (sathishzn) wrote :

Hi guys,

I figured the best way out for this is to search using just the period/full stop character ==> "."

This brings up everything in the specified folder.

Cheers...

Revision history for this message
Jussi Lind (jussi-lind) wrote :

This still happens in Ubuntu 15.10 and is very confusing. I first thought that the search is not working at all until I for some reason removed "*" from my search.

Revision history for this message
Sebastian (gustep12) wrote :

How to you use wildcards, especially the * (star) in Linux Ubuntu Nautilus GUI File Search?

I also was just struggling with this issue, but I think I found an answer.

Going back to the original post, here are the equivalent Windows and Nautilus search patterns:

Windows: "win*.dll"

Nautilus: "win dll"

Basically, try using a spacebar character in Nautilus where you would use a * character normally. I think I FINALLY figured this out, after years of trying... sigh.

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