[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
>           Musings, Opinion and Miscellanea, on Macs, iPods and more
>        Kirk McElhearn | Chemin de la Lauze | 05600 Guillestre | France
>
>
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