Archive Peek for Windows 95

Copyright 2000 Javier Thaine

Archive Peek for Windows 95 is a freeware program.

Archive Peek for Windows 95 and all of its related files may only be distributed in the original distribution form. The distribution file may not have files added to it or removed from it, and none of its contents may be modified, decompiled, or reverse engineered.

You may distribute this program as part of a shareware distribution, magazine, internet book, CD ROM, etc.

Archive Peek for Windows 95 is provided AS IS without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. In no event shall Javier Thaine be liable for any damages whatsoever including direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, loss of business profits or special damages, even if Javier Thaine has been advised of the possibility of such damages. Use this program at your own risk.

Have you ever wondered in what ZIP file you kept that song? Or in which ARJ file in the C:\Letters folder you kept that letter to dad? Archive Peek is the answer. You can search for any file you specify inside all of the archives of a floppy disk, CD-ROM, hard disk, etc. For updates of Archive Peek as well as a Windows 3.1 version of this program and more free software, go to my home page at:

First, some terminology: by "archives", I mean ZIP, RAR, ARJ or other files that contain more than one file within them.

When you start Archive Peek you will see the following:

1. Select the folder your archives are in by typing it in the box entitled "Look in:" or by clicking on the "Browse" button. You may type in more than one folder name in the box, separated by spaces, but you can only select one folder with the "Browse" button. The Search menu allows quick selection to make you search in all drives, all removable drives or all non-removable drives.

IMPORTANT: Since you can specify more than one path, quotes "" are required around paths that contain spaces.

2. In the "Find files named:" box, type in the files you want to find inside your archives. You can type up to one hundred names separated by spaces, and wildcards are allowed. If your filename has a space in it, put it between quotes ""

3. Click on "Begin Search" or press Enter.

Here is an example of a possible search. It demonstrates the use of multiple folder names, wildcards and spaces in filenames. Clicking on the button with the arrow next to each box allows you to choose things you typed in the past.

The number of files found and the time the operation took are displayed at the bottom of the window. While it is searching, Archive Peek also tells you in which folder it is looking.

You may double click on a file to open it. If it is not in an archive (just in a regular folder) or if it inside a ZIP file, Archive Peek will open it directly. If it is in another kind of archive, Archive Peek will run the program associated with that archive type (WinZip, for example.)

Archive Peek tells you many things about the files which it found:

"File" is the name of the file found. "Archive/Folder" is the compressed archive (ZIP, RAR, etc.) or the regular Windows folder the file is in. "Modified" is the last date and time this file was changed. "Size" refers to the original size of the file before compression. "Packed" refers to the size of the file after it was compressed. "Ratio" refers to the effectiveness of the compression: it tells you how much space was saved by compressing the file. For example, 0% would mean the file was not compressed at all. 50% would tell you that the file now takes half the space it originally took.

You can change the order in which the files are listed by clicking on one of these buttons shown in the image above. For example, if you click on "File", results will be sorted in alphabetical order by filename. If you click on "Modified", results will be sorted by date, and so on. If you click on one of these buttons a second time, the sorting order will be reversed. For example, if you click on "File" twice, results will be sorted in inverse alphabetical order.

You may save your results in text format or in HTML format by clicking on 'Save Results As...' in the File menu. You can also add the new results to an existing text file by clicking on 'Append Results to Text File...' in the File menu. Results will always be saved in the order they are sorted by on the screen. You may also print your results from the File menu. Archive Peek will only print the file and archive/folder names. If you want a nicer printout, it is recommended that you save your output to HTML format and then use your web browser to print the results.
NOTE: It is important to turn off word wrapping in notepad (in the Edit menu, "Word Wrap") in order to make the text file you saved legible. This is true for programs other than notepad too.

You can customize Archive Peek's operation through the Options menu:

Case Sensitive: Since Windows 95 supports lower and uppercase letters in filenames, this option allows you to specify whether the filenames you are looking for must be exactly those you typed (case sensitive) or if the case may be ignored (not case sensitive). By default, this option is turned off.

Include Subfolders: If this options is checked, Archive Peek will also look into all subfolders of the folder(s) you selected. By default, this option is turned on.

Display count only: If you only want to know the number of files Archive Peek finds, this speeds up the program a lot. The number of files is displayed at the bottom of the results window. By default, this option is turned off.

Show warnings: Archive Peek might have problems reading some archives. If so, leaving this option on will allow Archive Peek to tell you which archives it couldn't read and why. The warnings created by Archive Peek are saved in a "warnings.txt" file in the same folder as Archive Peek, and it is erased every time a search is performed. By default, this option is turned on.

Create shortcut in Start Menu | Programs and
Create shortcut in Start Menu | Find will create links to Archive Peek so that you can easily access it from the Windows Start Menu.

Advanced Options - You should take a look to see if any of these options can help you:

Archive types to look inside:

If you know what kind of archives the files you are looking for are in, choosing only them helps Archive Peek work faster. If you click on Select All, all of the formats will be selected. If you click on Select All again, all of the formats will be cleared. Selecting "File folders" will make Archive Peek look into ordinary folders, just like using the Start Menu's "Find Files or Folders" utility. By default, all formats are selected.

The currently supported archive formats are ZIP (used by PKZIP and WinZip), RAR, LZH, ARJ, ZOO, PAK, ARC, TAR (often used on UNIX machines), SQZ, HYP, WAD (used by games created by Id software), GRP (used by Duke Nukem 3D), CAB (Windows cabinet files) and ACE (used by WinAce archiver).

Saving results to disk:

These options affect the appearance of results when you save them to text or HTML files.

HTML options:

If you ever save your results to HTML files, you can change their appearance here. You can choose an item from the combo box and choose which color goes with it. 'Background color' refers to the 'paper' color of the HTML document. 'Visited link color' refers to the color of links that point to files you've already opened. 'Active link color' refers to the color a link takes when you click on it. You may also change the text and normal link colors of the document.

Of course, the color options for links are only valid if you check the 'Create hyperlinks' option. You may choose to turn this off to save hard disk space when saving a search that produced many results. Hyperlinks allow you to click on the names of files to access them.

The results in HTML format are displayed in a table. If you want that table to have borders, check the option 'Display table borders.'

Include...

Of course, when saving results to disk, you will always want to have both the name of the file found and the archive it was in included so you can retrieve it later. However, you might or might not want to include the last date and time the file was changed, the original size of the file before compression, the size of the file after the compression and the compression ratio which describes the effectiveness of the compression, so you may uncheck the ones you don't want here. By default, they are all activated.

More options

Normally, when saving results to a text file, Archive Peek aligns all the columns with spaces. However, if you want to load your results into a spreadsheet such as Corel Quattro Pro or Microsoft Excel, it is better to select 'Put tabs in the text file rather than spaces'. This will essentially make your text file unreadable to you, but as soon as you import it into a spreadsheet, it will have a nice tabular format. By default this option is turned off, since only few people may want to use it.

If you check 'Launch viewer when results are saved to disk', Archive Peek will start your web browser or text editor to view the file you save. This saves you the work of having to look for and open the file yourself. By default, this option is turned on.

To extract files from a ZIP archive, select them with the mouse and right-click on them. Then click on "Extract." You can also do this by selecting files with the mouse and clicking on "Extract selected files" in the File menu. Archive Peek can only extract files from ZIP archives and it can only extract them from one ZIP archive at a time.

If all goes well, this window will appear:

Type the name of the folder you want to extract the selected files to in the box next to "Extract to:" or click on "Browse." Selecting "Overwrite files" will allow Archive Peek to overwrite files without asking. Selecting "Extract with folder names" will let Archive Peek create subfolders if they exist in the ZIP file. Click OK to finish. The extraction may take a while and I have not yet programmed a progress indicator, so please be patient.

If you want to display only files within a certain subdirectory of your archive, you may type it before the filename you are searching. For example:

help\*.txt

This will search only for the text files inside the "help" directory of your archives. If a certain archive does not have a "help" directory, Archive Peek will not find any text files in it. This is also important: if the "help" directory has subdirectories (example: "help\techsupport"), files within those subdirectories will also be displayed. Files will also be found if "help" is a subdirectory itself (example: "files\help\techsupport"). You can also specify more than one subdirectory in which case Archive Peek will only report files found within subdirectories of such a combination. For example:
help\about\*.*

Some ZIP files are not supported due to their rarity. If such a file is encountered, Archive Peek will issue a warning if warnings are enabled. ARC files whose first byte is not Control-Z will not be read by Archive Peek and no warning will be issued. Also, Archive Peek won't find folders in CAB archives, only files.

From version 2.11 to version 2.2:

• Archive Peek now displays a file's modified date and time, original size, compressed size and compression ratio.
• Results can now be sorted by filename, by archive name, by date, by original size, by compressed size and by compression ratio, both in ascending order and in descending order.
• WinAce Archiver's ACE files can now be read.
• A configuration file is no longer needed: Archive Peek now uses the Windows registry to save its settings.
• You can extract files using the File menu.

From version 2.0 to version 2.11:

• More than one folder can be searched at a time: because of this quotes must be put around paths that contain spaces
• Files to search can contain spaces if they are within quotes
• Files can be searched within specific subdirectories in an archive
• Past searches are saved for easy access
• The window position is saved to disk when exiting Archive Peek
• The online help is now in HTML format
• A Search menu was added for quickly performing multi-drive searches
• Warnings are now issued when problems arise reading archives
• Archive Peek can do ZIP extraction by itself

From version 1.0 to version 2.0: Changes were not recorded.

First of all, Archive Peek would not be nearly as complete without the components written by William Yang (Dream Graphic Pack), Eric W. Engler (TZipBuilder), Todd Fast (TBrowseFolder), Eric J. Francois (ProgLink) and Nathan Fredrickson (TConstrain). Special thanks are due to Alexander Tarianik who developed a system allowing Archive Peek to be in the Start Menu Find section.

I would like to thank my good friend Jan Zlahoda for beta-testing, as well as Alexander Tarianik, Volker Wiens, Don Ferris, Hermann Seegert, Harry Albert Randrianasolo, Dale Sweetland, Bob Hamilton, Quique de Red Masters, Roland Piquepaille, Miroslav Jezek, Llew, Robert Hazelett and Robert I. Lasher for their precious suggestions.

Finally, I thank all the users of my software for supporting me, you've all been really helpful.