Hello, I would like to have spotlight to ignore all file with .dat extension. Do you know of any way to do this?
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Disable spotlight on certain files based on their extension
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Partron22
macrumors 68030
AFAIK, that's still not possible. Apple likely would have mentioned it if they added the feature.
You can do a few tricks with folders that you may find useful as a workaround:
How can I make spotlight ignore certain file types and directories?
You can do a few tricks with folders that you may find useful as a workaround:
How can I make spotlight ignore certain file types and directories?
This is the best I came to find.
http://www.cnet.com/news/how-to-prevent-spotlight-from-indexing-files/
Basically they claim one can add a .noindex at the end of the filename, I presume before the extension, but I might be wrong as I have not tested this.
http://www.cnet.com/news/how-to-prevent-spotlight-from-indexing-files/
Basically they claim one can add a .noindex at the end of the filename, I presume before the extension, but I might be wrong as I have not tested this.
What purpose would this serve? As long as you don't put "dat" in the search box, nothing will show up in your results.
The problem is not search results, but `mdworker` 🙂 that starts indexing files, in my case many Gb of them, and they do not contain stuff that I want to search in, let alone waste CPU on indexing them.
I hope now it is more clear ...
I hope now it is more clear ...
Part of the problem is that the Mac OS isn't very savvy to .dat files, and they can be of different types. You'll find that extension in Application Support for various applications, and in mail messages, etc. It would be tough to get Spotlight to ignore them since they probably get indexed as content type "public.data" so eliminating that, if you could, would probably exclude other useful files. Best to just construct a search so that they are excluded, or filtered/sorted to be out of the way.
That is an interesting comment indeed. I see the issue. However let me say that my question is more general, because sometimes mdworker start to index other big data files, that are not .dat, but contain some text based "big data" I work on. This can eat one cpu or more ...
So I am afraid I would still benefit a lot of a way to exclude certain file extensions from being indexed.
I would assume that your .dat files mostly live inside a particular folder. Just drag that folder into the list of items not to index and you should be fine, right?
yes! but no ... 🙂
files tend to be in certain folders, true, but every time you start a new project then you populate several new folders with such files ... and you have to add them all to the list of excluded folder. then you might as well install linux on your mac and, voila, your done 😛
well, don't take me wrong, I see that you all are trying to help, but I think the only truth here is that spotlight is missing a feature.
files tend to be in certain folders, true, but every time you start a new project then you populate several new folders with such files ... and you have to add them all to the list of excluded folder. then you might as well install linux on your mac and, voila, your done 😛
well, don't take me wrong, I see that you all are trying to help, but I think the only truth here is that spotlight is missing a feature.