Using Special Characters in Search Phrases

By adding special characters--quotation marks, parentheses, and asterisks--to your search phrases, you can make searching more precise. You can combine the characters to further refine your search.

Quotation Marks: Searching for Literal Phrases

Place the search phrase between double quotation marks to find documents that contain that literal phrase. For example, the search phrase "reading mail" finds documents containing that phrase. On the other hand, if you type reading mail, you will find documents containing one or both words.

Parentheses: Searching for Words in Proximity

Place words between parentheses to find documents with those words in proximity to each other. For example, the search phrase (reading mail) will find all documents that have "reading" and "mail" within a few lines of each other, in either order.

Asterisks and Hyphens: Searching for Variations on a Word

Place an asterisk at the end of a word to match all possible endings of the word. For example, the search phrase chang* will expand to "change," "changed," "changes," "changing," and so on.

If you do not know whether a term is one word, two words, or hyphenated in the documentation, you can insert the hyphen to look for all three forms. For example, to search for "mail tool," "mailtool," and "mail-tool," type mail-tool in the Search For pane.

Connecting Punctuation

Words connected by punctuation other than a hyphen are treated character for character as literal phrases, for example: /usr/local/bin, win_client_data, and in.rlogind.

Combining Advanced Search Techniques

You can combine any or all of the above search techniques to further refine your search. For example:

"chang* mail-tool" finds documents containing literal phrases such as "change mailtool," "change mail tool," "change mail tool," "change mail-tool," "changing mailtool," "changing mail tool," "changing mail-tool," and so on.

"display button" viewer searches for "display button" and "viewer" in proximity to each other.