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  PPC > Computing Guides > Windows  

Find That Path

Don Bradbury shows you how to locate a file on your disk drive.

Since way back, the specific location of a file in the folders (subdirectories) structure of a disk drive has been described as its Path. DOS used the term, and Windows preserves it; it has the same meaning under any operating system.

The quickest way to locate a file in Windows is to use the [Start] <Find Files> facility. Say you want to locate that neat animated file you remember you got with your Logitech webcam’s software, Animation, but can’t remember where it’s stored on the disk. You can’t recall what format the file was in, either, but you’re sure it was called Animation.<something>.  First, click on the [Start] button, then <Search>, and locate ‘For Files and Folders’ and click on that.

Where the cursor is flashing in the ‘search for files or folders named’ dialogue box, enter Animation.*. Then hit the [enter] key or click on [Search Now]. Windows will locate every file on your disk that is called ‘Animation.<something>’.

In the list that is given you’ll see that the particular file is in AVI video format, some 7791K large, and its full Path is, say:

C:\Program Files\Logitech\Quickcam\Samples\Animation.avi.

.avi files will probably have been associated with a particular video playing application already, say Windows Media Player, so you’ll be able to double click on the filename to play it directly from the search screen to check you have the correct one.

The entry dialogue is not case sensitive so you can enter animation.* or even aNimatiOn.* if you want. The file will still be found.

You could even enter simply ‘animation’, without the .* but Windows will then find every file containing that sequence of characters anywhere within the filename, so you’d have a bigger job locating the particular file you want.

Drag it

You can achieve the same thing by dragging the file from the Search dialogue to the Run dialogue box (after deleting the previously Run filename you’ll see there). That would have the advantage that if you wanted to run the file more than once, you could simply call up the [Start]<Run> dialogue and hit [Enter]. Do that as many times as you like - until you displace your Pathed file with another Run command, then you’d have to start again.

Any other reasons for wanting to find the Path to a file? Well sometimes it’s useful when you’re updating an application and you want to make sure the update over-writes the original, so avoiding wasted disk space with a separate installation. Locate the original executable file - usually <something>.exe - note the Path, and ensure you specify that location when installing the update (presuming you want to do that).