Raw Search Terms for "Spotlight Comment" and "Locked" Status

Question

Is it possible to do a raw search for a specific Spotlight Comment. I know the option exists in the Other… dialog box, but I need to find files that do not contain comments which is not choice.
Also, is there any way to find only files that are unlocked?

Answer 1

If you go to Others and select Raw Query you can use it find items with a specific comment, and items without any comment. For example, if you have the comment "testme" in the Spotlight field you would paste this into the Raw Query field:
kMDItemFinderComment == "testme"
and all files with that comment would be found. To find files in a folder that contain NO comment at all, you would use this:
kMDItemFinderComment != "*"
Be warned though: when I tried this on a folder with only 5 items in it, 4 with comments and one without. it worked, returning the lone uncommented file, but it took an amazingly long time to do so (perhaps a minute, while the search for "testme" was instantaneous).
The "File readable" and "File writeable" functions shown in Others, which presumably are what one would use to find locked files, simply do not work. This is not surprising since the information about whether a file is locked or not does not in fact appear in a file's metadata. I guess that will be a future addition. You can use find in Terminal to search for files that are locked/unlocked. Let me know if you really want to do this.
Francine
Francine
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