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Force the Finder to search for leading spaces in names Desktop
One of the Panther updates changed the behaviour of the search box in Finder. Searching for a string beginning with a space used to work as expected. Eg " Data" would find "My Data" but not "MyData." But since one of the updates (unfortunately I can't remember which one), OS X seems to ignore spaces at the beginning of the search string. So the above example would match both.

Do not worry though; simply use an option-space to force Finder to include the space in the string rather than ignoring it.
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Force the Finder to search for leading spaces in names | 4 comments | Create New Account
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Force the Finder to search for leading spaces in names
Authored by: wgscott on Apr 22, '04 11:29:26AM

Now if only the finder could use regular expressions



[ Reply to This | # ]
Preach it, brother! Preach it, brother!
Authored by: gdsimms on Apr 22, '04 12:39:15PM

Oh, what I could do with regular expressions in the "Finder finder." Anyone know of a plugin or hack that accomplishes this? I've looked at "A Better Finder Select" and such, but it's simply NOT the same as having regexps in the Finder.



[ Reply to This | # ]
zsh
Authored by: gidds on Apr 22, '04 05:14:45PM
Speaking personally, I don't miss regexps in the Finder, because the shell does all I want in that area.  Yes, I know that not everyone likes using the command line, and even if you do there are things it's not suited for.  But it's worth being aware of.

In particular, if your shell is zsh (supplied with Mac OS, and easily made the default), then the filename expansion is recursive.  So you can type (say) **/*.txt to find all text files in the current folder or anywhere underneath it.  You can add alternatives, exclusions, selection by type/length/dates/whatever, and tons more -- it's a really powerful feature, and I'm surprised more people don't use it.

---

Andy/

[ Reply to This | # ]

speaking of preaching...
Authored by: wgscott on Apr 23, '04 02:31:33PM
Well, I do. I am a slobbering zsh fan. Here is my zsh on OS X page. http://www.chemistry.ucsc.edu/~wgscott/xtal/zsh.html Help yourself to any functions you like, including the open -a completions, and the terminal-finder interactions.

[ Reply to This | # ]