File-Open dialog not showing all files/folders

Brian Phillips

I was trying to open the “hosts” file in a Windows 10 (64-bit) machine, which is located at C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\hosts, and the file-open dialog won’t let me navigate there, because it’s not showing the folders I need to click my way to it. I can get to C:\Windows\System32\Drivers, but at that point it just displays two directories and six files, and there are, in actuality, six folders (one of which is “etc”) and 435 files there. The search file type is “all files .”. There is a screenshot here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/bjmkvqji9onogmp/notepad.jpg?dl=0

And now that I’m looking at it more closely, the “modified” dates don’t even match. These are absolutely the same directory; I copied the path from Explorer and pasted it in to Notepad++'s file-open dialog. What’s going on?

Scott Sumner

@Brian-Phillips

Couldn’t see your screenshot as I’m currently being protected from the “evil” Dropbox…but maybe the File System Redirector is the culprit here?

Brian Phillips

You got it in one.

What makes it all the more confusing is that, if you pull down the “Look in” drop down from NPP file open dialog, it shows that you are viewing

C:->Windows->System32->Drivers

when, in reality, what it is showing you is

C:->Windows->SYSWOW64->Drivers.

So, the only way to open the hosts file (which only resides in \Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc), is to go there via explorer and use the context menu to open it with NPP? Or to type out the full and complete path to it in the file open dialog? There is to NPP GUI way to do it?

Seems odd.

PeterJones

@Brian-Phillips,

As it says on the File System Redirector page that ++@Scott-Sumner linked, “32-bit applications can access the native system directory by substituting %windir%\Sysnative”, so if you are using 32-bit Notepad++, and want to edit a file in the OS’s 64-bit system32\Drivers directory, you can browse to %windir%\Sysnative\Drivers or c:\windows\sysnative\Drivers (you can paste that in the File name box, or in the path-box at the top, if you’ve got that displayed), and it will be the files you expected.