Create Custom File Search Shortcuts For Windows Explorer

[Jared]

So I've spent the last several hours learning how to script Windows Explorer shortcuts to prompt searches and actually met with some success.

For example here's a shortcut which when run will search all drives (except C for quickbooks *.qbw and *.qbb files.

View attachment Quickbooks Search.zip

I'm probably going to create a bunch of these for all different file types to put in a folder on the external drives I return data on. That way when we get phone calls asking "where's my Quickbooks file?" or "where's my Outlook file?", I can just direct them to the links folder and tell them to click on the appropriate one.

Took me a while to figure out the syntax, but now that I have it should be pretty easy to modify:

%windir%\explorer.exe search-ms:"displayname=Search (Quickbooks)&crumb=*.qbw OR *.qbb =folderpath:=NOT C:&crumb=location:/"

 

[Jared]

Here's a couple more examples:
View attachment Outlook Search.zip
View attachment Picture Search.zip

 

[HaQue]

I also use a few custom search terms, and I think it is pretty powerful. I don't have my cheat sheet reference txt file here, but for example the main ones I use are to strip out all the rubbish from flash drives when recovering.

find all the MS Office Temp files that start with a tilde: name:~"*~*"

finds all files which begin with a period, even those which do not have an extension. -kind:folder excludes folders from the search: filename:.*. -kind:folder this is the commandline version: dir .*.* /s /a-D

MS reference, pretty powerful stuff: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa965711(VS.85).aspx

 

[Jared]

Right. My mission was to be able to put that search magic into a clickable link for them. Hardest part was figuring out how to exclude searching the C:/

 

[LarrySabo]

I usually provide a SNAP2HTML-generated listing of recovered files, as part of the quoting process. SNAP2HTML includes a search function and it works very well. If they ask me where's such-and-such file, I just refer them to the file listing (which I e-mailed to them earlier). Sometimes, I include the file list with the recovered data.