Finding a specific file - best techniques?

[ChrisGreaves]

I wanted to make sure that I had a copy of ES.EXE, and that it was on an appropriate path for execution (Command-line stuff). Now the name "es.exe" is somewhat short, and chances are strong that the two-letter string "es" appears in a great many executable filenames on my system. (447 - I just checked)
So I first used

ext:exe wholeword:es

.
This search found four items, one of which was "vso-image-resizer-4-1-0-2-es-en-win.exe", so I decided to test/hone my knowledge of search techniques and switched to using

ext:exe wholeword:es.exe

. This reduced the items to three in number. (All on my data partition, which tells me that es.exe is not installed on drive C. The amended search

c: ext:exe wholeword:es.exe

confirms this.)

But

wholeword:es.exe

delivers the same result as

ext:exe wholeword:es

Academic questions:
(1) In searching for this specific file ex.exe, with a specific purpose ("I want to do some command-line processing") what search string would you use as an improvement over mine?
(2) In searching for executables in general, what search string would you use as an improvement over mine?

I have got the job done; nothing critical hangs on this. In a sense I am setting a mid-term exam for myself, to test my knowledge of search techniques.

Thanks for any input
Chris

[void]

Please try the following search:

exact:es.exe

exact:

[ChrisGreaves]

Please try the following search:exact:es.exe

CommandLine_16.png (28.64 KiB) Viewed 1587 times

Thank you Void.
For this particular exercise the following search strings are synonymous (in terms of the Result List that they produce)

Code: Select all

exact:es.exe
ext:exe wholeword:es.exe
c: ext:exe wholeword:es.exe
ext:exe wholeword:es

Excepting for the forms of abbreviation ("ww" for "wholeword") one could build a table of synonymous search expressions , coupled with a list of redundant terms (on my system the "c:" path turns out to be redundant) or redundant components (one of "ext:exe" and the component ".exe" is redundant).
A great deal would depend on the host system (in this case my laptop). If I had a file es.exe.zip somewhere, then the "ext:exe" would come into its own.
Thanks, Chris