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In Windows 7 if I search for "debug" I would expect only files and folders that are EXACTLY debug. Which would only be extension-less files named debug, or folders.

Windows being it's ever ready "helpful" expands my results to return things like _debug or jquery.debug.js.

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3 Answers

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You can use the search filters with an equal sign to force the exact match.

So searching for "debug" returns everything with 'debug' in any searchable meta-data,

searching for "Name:debug" returns everything with 'debug' in the name,

and searching with "Name:=debug" returns only the entries that are named exactly 'debug'.

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I found having to do name: beyond incredibly stupid, doing just =Debug behaves as "debug" should. – Chris Marisic Jun 15 '11 at 20:08
Yeah I often think it should assume the "name" metadata, but how would you search 'all' metadata then? ;) – techie007 Jun 16 '11 at 2:43
the obvious answer is it should require "All:" since that's the strange case, so I should assume that running =debug is actually hitting the other meta values that maybe I will actually want to use the name: syntax sigh. – Chris Marisic Jun 17 '11 at 14:29
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from a command prompt: 

c:
cd \
dir debug /s/b

If you want only files named debug, use /s/b/a-d

If you want only directories, use /s/b/ad

You can also use /ah to search for hidden files.

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-1 this question was specifically about windows search – Chris Marisic Jun 15 '11 at 20:05
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If you want you can always use the power shell command

ls -r -filter "debug"

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-1 this question was specifically about windows search – Chris Marisic Jun 15 '11 at 20:06
@Chris techie007's answer is indeed better and goes directly to question (I gave him a +1) but do you think providing alternatives are actively bad. – Conrad Frix Jun 15 '11 at 20:18
IMO this would've been a good comment to the question, not an answer as it doesn't pertain to windows search. – Chris Marisic Jun 15 '11 at 20:58
@Chris. hmm well it does do a search on a windows box and does indeed give you a list of files and directories. Its not like I wrote "M$ Windoze sux use *Nix instead" – Conrad Frix Jun 15 '11 at 21:05
@Conrad Frix this would be more analogous if I had asked a question about a car and you responded about an airplane because it has wheels and can drive around on the ground that it's the same as a car. – Chris Marisic Jun 15 '11 at 21:11
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