Wildcard Select: The Most Useful Windows Utility Ever?

One of the things that has annoyed me for the longest time is the lack of wildcard selection in Windows Explorer. If you remember DOS, then you'll know what I'm talking about. In DOS you could type, for example, dir *.fla to see a listing of all your FLAs or dir data_*.sql to see files named data_0001.sql, data_0002.sql or data_did_he_really_die_in_the_last_film.sql.

Happily, I will be annoyed no longer because I just installed the free/open-source Windows Explorer wildcard selection shell extension by Matthijs Hollemans. It lets you right click in a folder and select files using wildcards.

Along with the Open Command Window Here feature in Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP, this has got to be one of the most useful little productivity utilities ever for the Windows power-user. (The commercial PowerGREP -- worth every penny -- comes a close third for me these days!)

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