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Run non-contiguous searches in the Finder Desktop
I'm guessing most people already know this, but I just discovered it, so maybe it will be new to some of you.

The toolbar's find box (Command-Option-F) will do non-contiguous searches. I discovered this when looking for a file called "bit depth and sample rate examples" and accidentally typed in "bit rate." It found the file even though the wording was wrong. I then tried "rate bit" and it found it again.

Pretty slick.
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Run non-contiguous searches in the Finder | 4 comments | Create New Account
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Run non-contiguous searches in the Finder
Authored by: forman on May 28, '04 02:19:18PM

The default behavior of the Finder file search is to treat spaces separating words as a boolean "or". If you want to search for the exact phrase "bit rate" in a file name, connect the words with option-space.

Michael.

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Substring Searches!!
Authored by: iRideSnow on May 28, '04 04:36:40PM

But how do you make the Finder search for substrings? For example, if create a text file that contains "Hello World", you can search for "world" and find it. However, if you change it to "HelloWorld" and do the same search, it won't find it. Very annoying!

What I really want is the ability to choose weather I want to do a "whole word" search, which is what the Finder search currently does, or a substring search, which it doesn't seem capable of doing. Or at least I haven't hit upon the magic combination that allows it.

I've filed a bug with Apple about it, but it wasn't fixed in the 10.3.4 release. Oh well.

Rob



[ Reply to This | # ]
Substring Searches!!
Authored by: david-bo on Jun 11, '04 05:39:31AM

The Find command in Finder performs substring matching.

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Run non-contiguous searches in the Finder
Authored by: zane on May 30, '04 06:37:32PM

I missed the original 'option-space' hint - that's quite handy to know.

What I'd really like however, is wild-card searching, such as "bit*rate", (which should pick up "bit rate", "bit-rate" & "bitrate").

Unless there already is and I've somehow missed it (as I did with 'option-space')?



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