Category Archives: Mythicsoft

Crash Reports

Crash reports are incredibly useful, they allow us a detailed look at the state of the software at the time of the issue. Some of the most gnarly and difficult bugs have been resolved through the use of crash reports.

Crash investigation tool

But of all the crash reports we receive we only look at about 1-2%. Why?

We receive just under 2,000 crash reports a month. Guess how many of those are from legitimate installations of our software? Yep, around 1-2%. Those illegitimate crash reports are filtered out and never looked at because the software is designed to crash if the software detects program manipulation.

Fortunately, for legitimate users of our software crashes are very rare but if you do ever experience one please send it, every genuine report is investigated.

Agent Ransack featured in Disney+ series

They say that imitation is the the sincerest form of flattery so imagine my surprise watching Dopesick (S1, E5) on Disney+ when the hard working DEA agent is introduced to a tool that looks like Agent Ransack:

“… what’s taken you months will now be accomplished in just a few seconds.”

I say ‘looks like’ because they’ve moved a few things around. Here’s the Dopesick screen shot (approx. 12:09s):

And here’s a screenshot of Agent Ransack circa 2003 (1.7.3):

They’ve removed the ‘File name’ fields and moved the date and size fields but the rest is identical.

Disney probably should’ve asked Mythicsoft for permission to use an altered version of Agent Ransack in their show but I’m satisfied with the compliment.

Version 2022 – Release

We’re really pleased to announce that the next version of FileLocator Pro and Agent Ransack is now available for download:

https://www.mythicsoft.com/filelocatorpro/download/

There’s lots of nice new features including:

  • New visual themes (including a Dark theme)
  • Improved indexing functionality, including a new automatic update scheduler, index groups, and indexing of archives (e.g. zip, tar etc).
  • Optical Character Recognition (OCR) functionality
  • Many more small updates and fixes

Continue reading

Agent Ransack 2019

Agent ransack 2019I’m pleased to report that Agent Ransack 2019 is now available for download.

Agent Ransack download page

This is a major new release for Agent Ransack and completes a big internal project to build Agent Ransack and FileLocator Pro from the same source tree. As I said in the Lite Mode post

Maintaining separate code branches for the Pro and Lite version is not an efficient way to develop the products. Over time the code diverges enough that it becomes harder and harder to apply patches from the Pro version to the Lite version. The loser in this patching battle is invariably the Lite version. Version 8 of FileLocator Pro has received nearly fifty enhancement updates since its release in 2016. The Lite version? Five.

So Agent Ransack will now be benefiting from the same update schedule as FileLocator Pro. Here’s just some of the new features that are now available in the Agent Ransack:

  • High DPI support
  • Faster file list loading, especially with ‘sticky’ sort.
  • Improved PDF searching
  • Updated language files
  • Dedicated portable installer
  • Freely available MSI files for unattended installations
  • and many small fixes

Probably the most prominent change you’ll notice is when you start Agent Ransack for the very first time, you’ll be asked if you want to try the Pro features:

You can, of course, just click ‘Lite (free)’ if you want to continue using Agent Ransack for free but if you are curious about what the Pro features might offer you can switch them on for the trial period. After the trial period has elapsed you can either switch back to the free Lite mode or pay for a Pro license.

As always, if you have any opinions on this change please let us know at: support@mythicsoft.com

 

Software Piracy

I was looking at a recent error report and surprised to see included in the error report a screen shot of a software pirate at work. The miscreant appears to have been trying to figure out why a crash was occurring with the license checks removed:

It’s not the first time I’ve seen such screenshots but it’s a useful reminder of how hard people work on tasks that, consciously or not, undermine the  structure of the company and the ability to support and improve the very products they, the pirates, want to use.

Continue reading

Version 8 – Feature Complete

Back in Apr 2016 when I introduced version 8 of FileLocator Pro I ended with a ‘Roadmap’ of planned features for version 8:

  • Customizable columns – the ability to add/remove columns and column options such as Author or Comments.
  • Document preview – WYSIWYG view for the most common document formats.
  • Thunderbird email searching.
  • Allow file criteria to be included in Persistent Search Filters.
  • Support for WPD attached storage (e.g. Phones).

The list was based on customer feedback and contained features I knew people wanted and would be disappointed weren’t in the initial release. I’m pleased to say that with build 2878 of FileLocator Pro the last of those promised features has been implemented. Over the last few years there’s been a lot of really nice new features added to the product which weren’t on the list but honouring the promises on the list was a major focus of the development efforts.

Continue reading

Lite Mode

If you’ve been paying attention to the release history of FileLocator Pro you may have spotted a new feature “Ability to switch to ‘Lite’ mode without installing separate product”, ie you can install FileLocator Pro but switch to FileLocator Lite functionality with just a few clicks.

It’s quite a major change and it’s going to affect the way we develop and distribute the Lite and Pro versions of the product. Rather than have a separate Lite product we’re going to be switching to a unified product that can switch Pro functionality on/off as required.

Continue reading

FileLocator Pro version 7.0

I’m really pleased to announce that FileLocator Pro version 7 is finally here!

FileLocator Pro Download Page

It’s hard to believe but it’s ten years since the first version of FileLocator Pro was released back in April 2003. Looking back at the old versions it’s quite amazing to see how much the product has improved over the years and we hope you’ll agree with us that version 7 is another great improvement. But, are the new features compelling enough for you to upgrade again? Well, here are the highlights:

Dedicated Word and Excel Filters

While IFilters work pretty well they don’t always work perfectly. They require a separate install, can often get confused by complicated formatting, and don’t provide text in a format intended for display. Therefore FileLocator Pro now has bespoke filters for Word and Excel files for improved text accuracy and formatting.

As you can see in this simple Excel example it makes quite a difference. However, if you decide you prefer the IFilter format you can revert to it in the Configuration settings.

Document Cache Settings

Document Cache Settings

Document Caching

While FileLocator Pro’s multi-thread searching algorithms are lightning fast they can still be slowed by the need to convert large documents into text every time they’re searched. Version 7 introduces a new Document Caching functionality that allows FileLocator Pro to store converted text in a caching database for use in subsequent searches.

This worked so well for one our beta testers, where search times over 26,000 PDFs went from over 5 minutes down to just 10 seconds, that they were able to use cached searches instead of going with an indexed search solution (avoiding with all the headaches associated with indexing).

Reporting

Reporting has long been a feature we’ve been looking to add to FileLocator Pro. Although it’s always had the ability to print the Hits tab or export to a file any form of customization required quite a strong technical ability. Not anymore, FileLocator Pro now includes a dedicated Reporting tab, with reports for Files, Contents, and Keywords. Each report can be customized and is available in numerous styles and formats, e.g. CSV, HTML, Text etc.

There’s much more we would like to do with Reporting but as always we’ll be guided by your feedback.

Column Filters

If I’m honest this was a self-indulgent feature. Something I really wanted, and actually delayed the release date for. It’s a simple idea, following a search you can filter the files listed by entering filters in the column heading.

Column Filters

Column Filters

Every column can be filtered on the text within the column but date-time and numeric columns can also be filtered on ranges, e.g. > 20KB < 100KB. Try it out, I think you’ll like it.

Saving Workspace

Saving Workspace

Sessions and Workspaces

Working with large result sets can take time, sometimes days. Version 7 adds a new Session/Workspace feature so you can save your search results and then re-load them back into FileLocator Pro at a future time.

It allows you to save just a single search tab (a Session) or all the open search tabs (a Workspace).

Other features

It’s not always the big features that make the biggest difference, sometimes the ‘small’ features can punch well above their weight. Here are some of my favourite new small features:

Search Again Ever found yourself copying text from the Text tab and pasting back into the Containing Text field to do another search? Well now you can simply right-click on the word and click the new Search Again menu option. The search will be re-run with the new word replacing what was in the Containing text field.
LINES Operator If you find yourself only wanting to search the first X lines of each file you’ll love the LINES operator. It can be used to limit the lines a following expression can appear in, e.g.
LINES:3-10 "ERROR"
Include filename in search Prior to version 7.0 FileLocator Pro only searched the contents of a file for the term in the Containing Text field. This new option adds the file name to the contents when evaluating the search.
File name presets

Filename presets

Filename presets

Rather than having to type in *.png;*.bmp;*.jpg;*.tif every time you want to search pictures FileLocator Pro now includes presets for:

  • Folders Only
  • Files Only
  • Music
  • Pictures
  • Videos

Note: With a preset selected the file name field is treated as a Boolean expression.

Thank you

Over the last ten years FileLocator Pro has morphed and grown through great continuous feedback from you, our customers, to the fantastic product it is today. But in some ways we’ve only just started. We’ve literally hundreds of features we’re going to be adding over the NEXT ten years. All of them focused on one thing, helping you work better by finding your data faster and easier!


Update: After this was sent out we had a great question:

“Just please tell me you didn’t do anything to slow it down. FL is bar none the fastest grep utility for Win. Please don’t do anything to bloat it up or slow it down.”.

It’s a good point and one we take very seriously, we understand it’s one of our key selling points. In all aspects of performance from application start-up and core search times to memory foot print we regularly compare the latest version to old versions just to make sure we haven’t inadvertently introduced any issues.

The improved accuracy and layout with the dedicated Word and Excel processing can occasionally result in slightly slower times than with Office IFilters but in our tests it wasn’t significant and was worth the small performance penalty. However, if you want the same Excel/Word processing as v6 just set the IFilter Search Priority to Primary in the IFilter Settings.

While we’re talking about performance, during this v7 release we’re going to be doing some profile guided optimization work to see if we can squeeze out another 5-10% speed improvement. I’ll keep you posted on that work.


Avast Win32:Evo-gen [Susp]: Some customers have been reporting issues with Avast anti-virus flagging the FileLocator Pro download EXE as Suspicious and deleting it, and then blocking any subsequent links to the download. Apart from how this makes us look we can only imagine how nervous it makes our customers feel, not the sort of experience you want for your sparkling new product update.

Unlike Norton, Kaspersky, and AVG Avast don’t have an ISV white-listing program for ISVs to clear their software before publishing and Avast’s support has been painfully slow in responding to our (numerous) requests. For now we can only apologize and thank you for your patience.

30 Sep 2013: We received an email from Avast this morning “False positive detection. We are sorry. Our virus definitions has been updated.”. So, if you’re still having problems please update your virus definitions and try again. If that doesn’t work please contact Tech Support and we’ll look into it.

Agent Ransack 2012 (revisited)

Okay, you may have noticed a distinct lack of Agent Ranasck 2012 in, well, 2012. Unfortunately there was so much work going on with our other products that Agent Ransack work was pushed back.

However, work has started (I’ve even seen a demo) and I promise that it will be out in 2013. Honest. No excuses this time.

P.S. There’s also some really cool stuff in the pipeline for FileLocator Pro and FileLocator Network in 2013. Watch this space!

FileLocator Pro and Large Searches

FileLocator Pro Crash ReportDuring August 2012 we quietly added a new crash reporting module to FileLocator Pro. Based on CrashRpt (an open source product hosted on Google Code) it’s one of the most useful quality control features we’ve ever added, although we hope it’s a ‘feature’ most of our users will never have cause to see.

Since then you may have noticed an increase in memory management related upgrades to FileLocator Pro. It’s not a co-incidence.

We’ve had a slow trickle of crash reports over the last few months and while most were odd, quick to fix, edge-case samples the majority have been related to memory management issues. It didn’t take long to see that FileLocator Pro had a problem on low spec’d machines performing searches where the data was in the gigabyte range and involved millions of files. We found a few problems that were simply bugs in the code, e.g. algorithms that reserved more memory than was necessary, but some of the problems were more subtle function related issues.

By default FileLocator Pro will record up to 10,000 lines of text per file and each line can be up to around 20,000 characters. That’s not usually a problem when searching in a limited set of files. Rarely will a file have 10,000 hits or a line have 20,000 characters. However, when searching over a very large data set with criteria that might not be very selective (e.g. searching for the letter ‘a’ – which was the actual search phrase in one of the crash reports we received) it can be a problem. It can be compounded by searching through file types that may not have EOL (End Of Line) markers, such as EXE or DLLs. Finally to make the whole thing just a little bit trickier, what might be a problem on a scrawny 512MB laptop is not necessarily a problem on sturdy 16GB PC.

The trouble is that FileLocator Pro doesn’t know at the beginning of the search if it’ll find a few hundred files with hits on a few lines (easy), a couple of files with hits on 10,000 lines (not a problem) or a million files with each one reporting hits on 10,000 lines (problem… probably).

FileLocator Pro 6.5 introduces a pre-emptive based solution. Based on the amount of memory installed on the machine FileLocator Pro sets an upper limit for un-restricted results per search (from 20MB up to around 200MB). If during a search that limit is reached FileLocator Pro starts restricting the search. Results for each file are reduced to around 20 lines, with a maximum of 256 characters per line, and the restriction is retained until the search finishes. If the search still runs out of memory then rather than crashing, as it did previously, it terminates the search.

Our tests on very low powered machines with just 512MB have shown a huge improvement in stability for very large searches and so far we haven’t received any memory related crash reports. Job done? Not quite but it’s one more step in cementing FileLocator Pro’s place as the ultimate super fast, rock solid, search and data analysis tool.

In a previous post I talked about ‘pushing a button that I think does nothing’. I hope you can see from our response to these bug reports that when you ‘Push the Button’ and send us a crash report it most certainly does something!