[X4U] Spotlight - Searching For An Exact String
lj Palmer
darwin at ljsworld.com
Tue Jul 12 08:30:09 PDT 2005
try
moby|walden
no spaces
..lj
On Jul 11, 2005, at 23:46, Kirk McElhearn wrote:
>
> On Jul 12, 2005, at 2:33 AM, Randy B.Singer wrote:
>
>
>> It is as yet undocumented by Apple, but you can indeed do Boolean
>> searches with Spotlight.
>>
>>
>> (-...) = NOT
>> | = OR
>> space = AND
>>
>
> It's undocumented because it doesn't work. I've been writing a lot
> about Spotlight, and was interested when I saw this stuff on the
> web. I contacted someone at Apple who handles Spotlight, and he
> said that this sort of gives the kind of hits you describe
> sometimes, but this is not how it works.
>
> I just did, for example, a search for:
>
> moby | walden
>
> I have several electronic copies of Walden on my computer, which I
> use for searching and examples in books and articles. It found moby
> alone (a recent article I wrote about Melville) but when I ran the
> above search, found nothing.
> If I search walden alone, it finds more than 100 hits.
>
> The AND works, because, by default, all Spotlight searches (other
> than those in quotes) are AND searches.
>
>
> Kirk
> Author of: The Mac OS X Command Line: Unix Under the Hood
> http://www.mcelhearn.com/unix.html
> - - - - - -
> Read my blog: Kirkville -- http://www.mcelhearn.com
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> Kirk McElhearn | Chemin de la Lauze | 05600 Guillestre | France
>
>
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