Spotlight find files (Like Pages...) contents

[sdz]

Hi,

// Edit:
After plugin the device in, it somehow finds the content...

I seem to be unable to find a document that I created in iWork Pages by searching for it's content. The word is within the document yet neither the Files.app nor the Spotlight search finds the document by this word.

I am accustomed from the mac that spotlight finds also files by knowing its contents.

What am I doing wrong?
According to this Apple Community post it should work (but I doubt it):

Dateien auf Inhalt durchsuchen - Apple Community

communities.apple.com

Thanks & Regards

 

[LTJX]

This is a good example of a fundamental difference between current GUI-centered OS’s like iOS, Windows, etc and the Unix/Linux family of OS’s.


Unix originally evolved as something of a text-processing Swiss Army knife with an emphasis on programming tasks. To search for text strings in any selection of files within a directory hierarchy, there is a wealth of command-line tools starting with “grep”, egrep (with “extended” options) and fgrep (for simple but “fast” searches). Grep has a default version (grep string *files.*) plus hundreds of additional command-line options such as “-i” for case-insensitive (find either A or a) and hundreds more.

In Unix/Linux you can always assume that commands like grep will search all specified files for which you have at least ‘read’ access. Such Unix commands work perfectly with plain-text files, but will also search any other form of file content, even executables (though with only “best effort” attempts at displaying non-text elements of file content).

 

[It’s always something]

For what it’s worth I just did a search for a word that I know exists in a Numbers file I have, and Spotlight didn’t find the file. I suspect Spotlight isn’t configured to search every file type on iPads. 🤷‍♂️

 

[LTJX]

This is a good example of a fundamental difference between current GUI-centered OS’s like iOS, Windows, etc and the Unix/Linux family of OS’s.


Unix originally evolved as something of a text-processing Swiss Army knife with an emphasis on programming tasks. To search for text strings in any selection of files within a directory hierarchy, there is a wealth of command-line tools starting with “grep”, egrep (with “extended” options) and fgrep (for simple but “fast” searches). Grep has a default version (grep string *files.*) plus hundreds of additional command-line options such as “-i” for case-insensitive (find either A or a) and hundreds more.

In Unix/Linux you can always assume that commands like grep will search all specified files for which you have at least ‘read’ access. Such Unix commands work perfectly with plain-text files, but will also search any other form of file content, even executables (though with only “best effort” attempts at displaying non-text elements of file content).

Note: in the post above, I may have slightly misrepresented the meanings of the Unix/Linux search commands egrep and fgrep. The egrep command does have extended capabilities (beyond grep) but this applies specifically to extensions to its use of regular expressions in defining searches.
And fgrep is not for “fast” searches (though it may be faster than grep) but it actually means a focus on searches for fixed-length strings.
Sorry for any confusion caused.

 

[LTJX]

Note: in the post above, I may have slightly misrepresented the meanings of the Unix/Linux search commands egrep and fgrep. The egrep command does have extended capabilities (beyond grep) but this applies specifically to extensions to its use of regular expressions in defining searches.
And fgrep is not for “fast” searches (though it may be faster than grep) but it actually means a focus on searches for fixed-length strings.
Sorry for any confusion caused.

Note2: Two more powerful search-related commands included with all Unix/Linux versions are awk and sed.
The sed command stands for ‘stream editor’ and it specializes in applying text edits (using ‘ed’ syntax) to directed text streams.
And awk is a mini-programing language for defining simple to complex actions to be performed on search results. It can be a very quick and effective way to write useful programs right on the command line. The “awk” stands for the last names of its 3 developers at AT&T Bell Labs circa 1970 (Aho, Weinberg, Kernighan, as I recall).