Way to search & find Files or Folders with no Extension in Windows

Question

How do i search files with no extension? For best effect i would like only <4kb and if i could search inside for the text thewordiwant

I also have visual studios but i dont think writing thewordiwant with * as type of files is a good idea. Also *. doesnt search only files with no extension.

Answer 1

I was facing this issue today on Windows 8 and have noticed it on previously on Windows 7 as well. I finally found a way to do this right and I hope this answer helps the original posters and others who come here via google searches.

Typically for normal as well as advanced power searches I used Nirsoft SearchMyFiles and stopped using Windows Search.

But, for some reason I was having trouble getting it to find files without any extensions. I figured the same bug was there in this app as well.

But, I was wrong and apparently Nir Softer has redesigned his wild card & regular expression engine from scratch; as per this little gem I found posted on the page in "Versions History" section:

• Version 2.40:
  • SearchMyFiles now uses an internal wildcard parser instead of basing the search result on the wildcard parser of Windows. This change solves an annoying bug caused by Windows wildcard parser: In previous versions, SearchMyFiles sometimes returned incorrect results, because Windows also matches the wildcard with the short filename (8.3 DOS format).
  • Notice: The new wildcard parser may cause some compatibility issues, for example: When you scanned using . wildcard with Windows parser, it returned all files, including files without extension. With the new SearchMyFiles wildcard parser, . returns only files with extension. In order to return all files, you should use * instead of .
  • When loading old config files, SearchMyFiles automatically converts all . wildcards to *
  • The new wildcard parser has some advantages, for example: if you search for ..., you'll get all files with 3 dot characters or more. With Windows wildcard parser in previous versions, you simply got the list of all files.
  • You can now exclude files by using wildcards list. You have to select this option from the combo-box, because the default option is to exclude files by extension.
  • You can now specify environment strings in the 'Base Folders' and 'Excluded Folders' fields (For example: %AppData% )

So to find files without extensions don't use these:

*.* or *.

Just use a simple:

* 

For example :

Files Wildcard: *
Subfolders Wildcard: * 
File Size: At most: 4 KB / 4096 Bytes

Note: Please don't go by the wild cards shown in the 'old' screenshot posted above.

Answer 2

At the Command Prompt:

dir c:\*. /s /a-d

This will locate files with no extension (*.) on C:\ and all subdirectories (/s) and exclude directory names (/a-d).

This will only locate files based on name. It won't address your other criteria of file size or contents.

Answer 3

Windows search is severely lacking in being able to search for text inside any file type. Here's a good replacement which hooks well into Windows. http://www.wingrep.com/ of course it's free.

To answer your main question though, just search for the filename without the extension. There's nothing saying you need to specify an extension in your search terms, and if you start typing a search term, look at the bottom of the dropdown and you will see in blue text "size:". Click that to specify a size constraint.