Paul,

Windows has zipfldr and cabfiles capabilities.

Yep. Which you can't tell "search" to ignore (or /only/ look in) ... :-(

An inverted index can do anything you might want,

I always had my doubts about such indices being able to capture all
character combinations in a searchable way - without bellowing out I mean.
I do sometimes have the need to search for partial words. Pretty much
also why I disabled the indexing service.

as long as it has "search providers" for such formats.

Due to that description overlapping with "internet search providers" it
seems to be hard to find anything about it. Do you perhaps have any other
name for me (from the registry perhaps) ? Not that I currently would want
to create one myself mind you, but just so I can have a look at them (read:
curiosity, plain and simple).

Grep is relatively useless, because it won't be looking
for both 8 bit (narrow) and 16 bit (Windows wide) characters.

:-) I'm rather old fashioned, and do not believe I should save a file in
ginormous (and complex!) format when a simple ASCII save will do as well (I
do not really believe in a lot of markup anyway). To be honest, I do not
even have a program like the "Word" text-editor installed, as I seem to do
fine with 'simple' ASCII editors. Heck, I do not even view/edit textfiles
in Write unless the file gets to big for Notepad.

In other words, grep works fine for most files files I saved myself (which
is most of them).

You can miss a lot if you're not careful with search.

Yup. Though for simple text-based searches its not too bad. Though even
there it has got its gotchas. With this threads starting reason as a
(luckely!) obvious one. :-(

For specialized searches, I've written simple programs in C
to get what I want.

Similar here. Though I early on recognised that doing wide-string (let
alone multi-byte) searches is rather difficult, with several codepoints
mapping to the same displayed symbol (and no clear indication that they do).
I therefore resigned myself to ony look for "two byte ASCII" (high byte
always zero).

Regards,
Rudy Wieser