Search parameters

In the main window, you can enter the phrase to search for and to replace with. If you have selected Regular expressions mode, you can use metacharacters in the search pattern.

Search modes

Browse for files

By pressing the Browse button, you can select the folder to search in.

File masks. When you select a folder, the program adds the *.* file mask (all files) to the folder path, for example, C:\My Documents\*.*. You can enter a different mask in the field, e.g., *.txt to find all text files. If you want to specify several masks or files in one folder, please use | to separate them. For example, use C:\Website\*.txt|*.htm|*.html to search in text and HTML files stored in the C:\Website folder.

Just like in other Windows programs, * in the file mask matches any number of characters and ? matches one character or nothing.

Skip subdirectories. You can uncheck Include subdirectories if you want to search only in C:\Website, but not in C:\Website\News or C:\Website\AboutUs. When you uncheck Include subdirectories, Aba adds *?.* to the mask. This is a notation specific for Aba and not supported in other programs. You can combine it with normal masks, for example: C:\My Documents\*?.txt to find all text files in C:\My Documents, but not in its subdirectories. The question mark must come after any star: *?

If you select several files in Explorer, then run Aba from the context menu, the Browse button shows you not the folder selection dialog, but the file selection dialog. You can select several files in this dialog by holding the Ctrl key and clicking the files to select.

The drop-down list shows you the last 20 directories that you searched in. You can select a folder from this list to search in it again.

You can also select the files in Explorer and run Aba from the context menu.

This is a page from Aba Search and Replace help file.