Linux Regular Expression (RegEx) syntax integration

Posted over 3 years ago by Steve Veach

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Steve Veach

Hello Everyone,

Maybe I'm missing something obvious. Can someone show me what search would be necessary to find files like these in one search statement? I'll use Linux regular expression syntax to indicate what I'm trying to find, since I'm more familiar with that syntax. When I use Open Source search tools that support Linux Regular Expression syntax this search works perfectly.

^[0-2][0-9] *.mp3

In English, this is "All files that begin with 0, 1, or 2 followed by a 0 through 9 followed by "zero or more" spaces followed by a period followed by "mp3".

CopernicSearch is a great tool in many ways but my version doesn't support Linux-type Regular Expressions. I wonder if the latest versions do. This is quite a short-coming IMO if you're very technical and understand Linux RegEx.

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7 Comments

Joshua Wright posted over 1 year ago

Adding my voice of support for regular expression matching, both for file names and file content.

Voidtools Everything is a useful and free alternative to Copernic Desktop Search, and it supports regex for file names and content, but it doesn't index content. This makes any searching using a regular expression very slow.

Any kind of regular expression matching is going to be much slower than normal string matching. Maybe Copernic can add this as a non-default feature that has to be turned on? A "power users" feature perhaps?

My specific use case is to look for data patterns in company SMB shares that indicate sensitive information disclosure. For example, I'd like to know it if any users copy a file to a company-wide file share that includes a Canadian SIN ("\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{3}").

Even a partial implementation of regex support would be most welcome. Anchoring with ^ and $ might not be feasible depending on how the indexed data is stored in Copernic's data structures - I'd be OK with that limitation if I can still do list-based matching [password|access_key|etc].

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Mirco Persechino posted over 2 years ago

Hi @FL Yong

No it is not supported for the moment. As you can see here there are a couple users asking for it. We'll let you know if we plan on adding it in a future update.

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FL Yong posted over 2 years ago

Hi, may I understand if regex is currently supported in Desktop Search tool now?

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Steve Veach posted over 3 years ago

Great minds think alike. I already found, installed, and used Everything. It's pretty amazing for searching for file names. Thanks!

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David W Selway posted over 3 years ago

Max L.

If all you want is to search for files (not contents of the files) get the free program Everything by www.voidtools.com. It uses regular expressions and has many very useful features.

If you need to search contents with regular expressions, try PowerGrep ---- not free.

Regards

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Mirco Persechino posted over 3 years ago

Hi Steve,

I had a look at your request with our development team and regex (regular expressions) aren't supported yet in Copernic Desktop Search.

We've logged the feature request to our product development team so it could be considered in a future development.

Apologies on the same.

Best Regards,

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Mirco Persechino posted over 3 years ago

Hi Steve!

Thanks for reaching out on our new community forum!

I'm not really sure if we support Linux Regular Expressions syntax right now, but i'll have it checked by our development team.

I created a ticket for you on that matter, we'll be in touch with you shortly.

Thanks.

Kind regards,

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