spotlight and unix files

[louiek]

I've got a bunch of files that have been tagged in finder as being of kind "unix executable file", they're not, they're roms, .nds, but that doesn't matter. When I try to find them all using spotlight, it manages to find some of them, claiming that they're of kind "document" now, but misses most of them. I don't care what it thinks they are, I just want to find them all. How do I get spotlight on leopard to check every single file?

Thanks.

 

[richard.mac]

try searching with Finder's Spotlight with all of these entered/selected.

 

[louiek]

Makes no difference unfortunately.

thanks

 

[BobZune]

See general explanation of spotlight at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software)

"Spotlight comes with importers for certain types of documents, for example Microsoft Word (DOC) and Portable Document Format (PDF) documents, and Apple publishes APIs that allow developers to write Spotlight Importer plug-ins for their own file formats."

Some for several of the documents TYPES you have, there is no plug-in describing how to interpret the information in it. If you save them as .txt files (for example, copy ramdisk1.scpt file and save as ramdisk1.txt), spotlight will index and find the information. You can have someone write you a plug-in for the file types you desire. For what is supported, see the Spotlight preferences under search result categories.

 

[louiek]

Some for several of the documents TYPES you have, there is no plug-in describing how to interpret the information in it. If you save them as .txt files (for example, copy ramdisk1.scpt file and save as ramdisk1.txt), spotlight will index and find the information. You can have someone write you a plug-in for the file types you desire. For what is supported, see the Spotlight preferences under search result categories.

Thanks BobZune, that makes sense, but at the very least it should index the filename, it doesn't need a plug-in to interpret that. I did an info on one of the files, set it to always open with textedit and then applied that to all files of that kind and now it finds them all.

Thanks,
louie.

 

[BobZune]

You are welcome.

You can do the CMD + F and click on the + and add System files, if you want the file names to be found. Include "other" and see some other options. Search on OS X is very good but still needs some work -- or at least better documentation.