Spotlight wildcards - what's the trick?

[jaskra]

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]

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]

Spotlight defaults to a "contains" search.

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

 

[reubs]

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.

 

[Thomas Davie]

type in kind: pdf cat and that will narrow it down. It you just type in knddf 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

 

[jaskra]

knddf 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!

 

[GGJstudios]

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.

I use Name Mangler for batch file renaming. It works great!

 

[chocodup]

Searching for more information about Thomas <file type> trick (Thanks again for this one), I found the following article that details plenty of Spotlight tricks :
http://www.usingmac.com/2007/11/22/leopard-optimizing-spotlight-search

I think many people can find it very interesting.

 

[toltmanns]

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?