Select Filtered Folders (Enhancement Request)

[Michael Bulgrien]

The Edit menu currently contains the following:

Select All
Select All Files

Please add a "Select Filtered Folders" that allows the user to select all folders that match their folder filter criteria. For example, when I have the following folder filter in plauce:

.\*\*\*\LogFiles
.\*\*\*\Reports
.\*\*\*\TestTools
.\*\*\Interim

I would like to be able to select the folders without selecting their parents, grandparents, great grandparents, etc. There currently is no easy way to do this.

I need this functionality so that I can delete the folders themselves, and not just the files within them. "Select All files" allows me to delete the files, but leaves the folders in place. "Select All" would select the parent folders as well (which I do not want selected for my delete operation).

[Michael Bulgrien]

If you don't have time to implement this for the final 3.0 release, please at least get it on the official wish list. Thanks.

[Zoë]

Are the parent folders that you don't want deleted empty except for the items that match the filters? If not there's already two behaviors that will help with this:

1) The "Include hidden items in operation" checkbox we added a while ago. Just select everything and as long as that checkbox isn't checked the parent folders won't be deleted since they'll contain items that won't be deleted.

2) I don't know how well documented it is, but there's special behavior if a folder and its contents are selected. If a folder is selected and some, but not all, of it's children are selected then the parent folder's selection is ignored. That means that if you use "Select All" and the parent folders that you don't want deleted have any excluded children at all they won't be deleted, regardless of the checkbox from (1). This behavior is also in BC2, which is why it's a bit redundant with the new option.

[Michael Bulgrien]

Thanks. I guess I knew that. However, initiating a delete when a selection contains dozens of items that I do not want deleted always makes me nervous. I was hoping for an easy way to avoid this "discomfort". It doesn't seem like it would be a difficult thing to implement, but I'll make do with the existing functionality if you don't see any worth in my suggestion.