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Spotlight wildcards - what's the trick?

J

jaskra

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 10, 2008
11
0
I seem to recall reading somewhere that wildcard search should work 10.5.x Spotlight.

I type
*IMG* into spotlight (I have tons of JPG files with this filename) and get No Results Found

If I try other searches like catalog*pdf where I know I have a file called catalog.pdf, it still does not find anything.

Is there a trick to searching with wildcards in Leopard Spotlight?
 
chocodup

chocodup

macrumors member
May 17, 2008
34
3
I never succeeded in using wildcards in Spotlight.
Instead, I use the Find of Finder.

You can specify as many search criteria as you want (click the "+" button under the basic search field)

Example:
Filename contains IMG
AND
Type is image
 
PeteB

PeteB

macrumors 6502a
Jan 14, 2008
523
0
Spotlight defaults to a "contains" search.

So just typing 'img' into spotlight brings forth loads of hits.
 
R

reubs

macrumors 68000
Jun 22, 2006
1,866
175
Wildcards are drastically underused IMO. I wish I could get them to work in Automator for renaming batches of files, but it just isn't happening to this point.
 
T

Thomas Davie

macrumors 6502a
Jan 20, 2004
581
342
type in kind: pdf cat and that will narrow it down. It you just type in knd:pdf you will get a list of all pdf files. You can also use boolean poerator in there such as AND NOT OR and so on.

Apologies if this is obvious.

Tom
 
J

jaskra

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 10, 2008
11
0
knd:pdf not working for me

Thanks all for your tips

@Thomas the kind:<file type> trick is a good one - I'll use that to narrow it down

@chocodup - I had not messed with the advanced search options in finder search - makes things easy too

cheers!
 
T

toltmanns

macrumors newbie
Aug 12, 2008
3
0
finder wildcards

After reading a threaded response, I noticed that there is no way to negate a search criteria (say anything matching the search, except for in a file ending with X). Any idea? Can anyone recommend a great osx literary resource?
 
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