Spotlight questions...

I would like to search one of our server drives for all files above a specified size to clean up videos that people have downloaded.
This was easy back on 10.3.9
With spotlight I tell it to search for files more than 15mb on the drive with users folders, and wind up getting 10 results when there should be WAY more.
Is there a way to access the old "find/search" window?
If not, how do I make spotlight actually search the entire disk? It seems like its leaving lots of stuff out.

You wrote: "I'm actually physically on the server (console). Drives are on an Xserve RAID array and I am searching directly from the host server."Sorry, I misunderstood. I've not tested Spotlight in that context.
You wrote: "We'd like to search in a manner similar to the "old" search from 10.3.x"That function no longer really exists. Find is implemented in Spotlight.
Is the disk in question a single volume or multiple volumes?
I've found that if indexing is disabled on a volume using the command
sudo mdutil -i off /pathtovolume
then the Find command behaves like the old Find in earlier versions of Mac OS X when searching for file system metadata. However, in this context you can't use the Spotlight "classifications" of data, nor can you search for content. For example, if indexing has been disabled on a volume, to search for movies, instead of:
Kind: Movie
you have to search for specific extensions representing movie files, using the Name Extension criteria, e.g.
Name Extension: wmv
or
Name Extension: mov
Criteria like Size > Greater than > _ > MB also work in that context. Searches for this kind of file system metadata actually search the disk directory, not the Spotlight index.
Searches for the different "Name Extension" criteria can be saved as Smart Folders.
Note that indexing must be disabled as noted above with the mdutil command. Find will not work as described if the volume has been added to Privacy. This is one of the anomalies in Spotlight between Find and the -i off flag I describe in my "Stop Spotlight Indexing" FAQ.
Again, I've not tested any of this with Xserve RAID, but you can play around with it.
You can look for alternative search utilities by searching MacUpdate or Version Tracker for either search or find. One of the most popular, EasyFind, is not going to help you here since it is based on the UNIX® find command, which does not support operators like ">".
You might also try your question on the XServe RAID Discussion to see what others using that platform have experienced.
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

Similar Messages

Many Spotlight Questions

The more I read both forums and manuals the more I have questions: Our system...
We have an XSAN 2.2 system with one volume on XRAIDs called Graphics, this on two MDCs, two Xserve fiber SAN clients running AFP, SMB, FTP - main and backup. All clients whether Mac or PC are Ethernet gig-E. All Apples are on 10.5.8. We have a Linux dual niced NAS to protect an Avid Unity from malware. We do Network Homes on the XSAN and Portable Homes locally. 8gig RAM on each of the four servers. Adobe Suite, Curious, AE FCP Studio are the main apps.
1. Which computer of the four in our XSAN should do the Graphics Volume indexing for Spotlight? The File Server gets quite busy so I was thinking it should be a task assigned to a MetaData controller. Can it be done on the backup or on the backup file server and only one of the four?
2. It seems the local clients can do local Spotlight quickly but slowly Find into the XSAN shares.
3. How do the Ethernet clients know when to use Spotlight Server indexing rather than their own? The same I suppose for Fiber attached SAN clients. Or is the indexing only done once on each volume and not duplicated elsewhere?
4. Can networking be shared between the two file servers, say AFP on one, FTP and SMB on the other. I know it complicates fail over but we don’t have an elegant way right now. MDC failover seems to work well and we go back and forth when we need to do so.
5. Does 10.5.8 and up need to have ACLs propogated on Spotlight shares to create a Spotlight user? I tried it, seemed to help but the index volume got corrupted.
6. What metadata services run on the server and client when doing Spotlight Server?
7. Would propagation of extended attributes help or is it not advisable in a mixed network of OSes and protocols?
8. Where must mdimporters reside to be useful to the Volume that is Spotlight shared? Can I collect all the different ones and just drop them into Library/Spotlight?
9. I note lots of sloppy use of terminology. Volumes and shares seem to be synonymously used but I think spotlight only sees volumes that are shared. Most don’t bother to say whether they have just Xserve or MDCs, or XSAN Volumes, Ethernet or Fiber attache.
10. I want to limit the local Spotlight search and that I know how to do, but I also want it to search using Spotlight server powered indexing and searching. On an Ethernet Mac client how do you make it use Spotlight server resources for searching the index created by one of the XSAN servers mentioned above. Right now if I mount Graphics and point to that for search there is no search wait cursor and no results. It burdens the file server with high CPU. If we search one of the shared folders under that volume it allows a slow client side find search that does not tax the server. User, group, everyone has read/write on the Volume via UMOD mask set on each Mac client. Thanks

Start with http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/Leopard/leospot.html and my mod to Finder's Find at http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6725932 for what you can change so you can find stuff. As for the rebuilding, I've never seen that happen.

Three Spotlight questions

1) In Finder, pressing Command-F bring up Spotlight. Is there any way to make Spotlight search only file/folder names by default? (Not searching file contents).
2) Is there any way to prevent Spotlight to start searching before I finished typing? (I assume "no" since the tips in this discussion suggests typing in another app and paste in Spotlight)
3) I was trying to use Spotlight to find file/folders whose names contains diacritical marks, such as "ä" (without quotes). Spotlight presented thousands of files containing "a" (without quotes). I don't want "a", I want "ä". How do I do that?

When you press Command-F to bring up a Find window it should be showing what some programmer thought would make a good default, which has the Search field at the top (DO NOT FALL FOR THIS, leave it blank unless you actually want to search file contents), then a set of criteria. I no longer remember what they were, but they weren't Name: Contains, which is what everyone wants most of the time.
Furthermore, the default of Groups View rather than List results in very slow responsiveness. It behaves much better if the default is List view--I haven't been bothered at all by the "starts searching immediately and drives me nuts because it is so slow and unresponsive" business since I made my Find window open in List view.
Now you can change the Find window each time you bring it up, or create a Smart Folder with your preferred settings and leave it in the Dock (and remember to say don't save when you fill in different search terms). Or you can customize the default behavior.
It's easy if you have Developer Tools installed and can use the Property List Editor. The default behavior is given by this file:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/default_smart.plist
My personal version is here:
http://homepage.mac.com/francines/.Public/default_smart.plist.zip
Be sure to save a copy of the original (you can rename it and leave it in place). You can do a search here in the Spotlight Forum on default_smart.plist if you need more detailed directions for making the switch. There is also a discussion of this at MacOSXHints:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050501162147222
As for the "ä" problem: actually surrounding the term that contains the umlaut with quotes might improve your search results. The quotes tell Spotlight to look for that exact string as file or folder name, if you use the menubar Spotlight.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

Spotlight question: Difference between "Modified" & "Last Modified Date" ??

In a Spotlight window, you can add many types of search criteria. Among them are two pairs of criteria that sound nearly identical. Can someone explain exactly what the differences are?
1st pair: "Modified" & "Last modified date"
+They're described this way:+
Modified: "Date the file content was last changed"
Last modified date: "Date when the content of this item was modified"
2nd pair: "Created" & "Created date"
+They're described this way:+
Created: "Date the file was created"
Created date: "Date when the content of this item was created"
I found nothing via Google, and David Pogue's "Missing Manual" doesn't mention these either. Very curious what the distinctions are here.
Thanks!

Modified: "Date the file content was last changed"
I would hazard a guess at the difference, "Date the file content was
changed" would be the date the content was changed - obviously.
Last modified date: "Date when the content of this item was modified"
I would read this to mean the date any other details of the file were
modified e.g. a rename would change this item but not the content, use
of the touch command to change a date, moving the file from one directory
to another, changing permissions i.e. anything that changes any aspect of
the file except the content.
As I said, just a guess.
Dave

Spotlight question

I want to search for a string of words, for example: "this is a test phrase".
It seems that Spotlight searches for all documents with all the words in that phrase. So any document with the words: this, is, a, test, and phrase will be listed.
I would prefer to search for the exact phrase ("this is a test phrase"). How can that be done?
thanks
Ken

No, using quotes will search for content. Thus if I do a Command-F search on my Documents folder, with this is the Search for box:
"making and breaking alliances"
The Documents folder is selected as the Search location, and Contents as the search type, and I get one and only one result, a file named "UnhingedMetaphors" that contains that phrase. Oh, and the folder contains 2,817 files, the result is returned instantly. If I do NOT surround the phrase with quotes I get five files--the one with phrase, plus a file on Cesare Borgia, and several books from Livy's history of Rome.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

Apple Mail -VS- Spotlight question

When I search in Mail, seems like some emails are not found. For example, I enter a word like "package" in the Mail search bar, and select to search everything/everywhere in Mail... some emails are found
But when I do the same word search in Spotlight, I get more, and different, results...
Why ?
Why Mail seems to have a gap in the results (like not a lot of results between 2008 to 2012, but before and after yes) ?

This happens when the option to save drafts on the server is enabled. You can disable this option in Mail under Preferences -> Account -> Mailbox Behaviour.

Spotlight Question - Missing Copernic

Converted to MBP from PC in April 2008, incredibly satisfied with one exception. When I search a term in Spotlight, it will find all the documents or e-mails that have that term in them, but will not highlight the term within the document/e-mail if you do a "Quick Look," so I have to open the document and do a separate search for the term. Prior to April, I used Copernic desktop search on my PC, which would find the documents and highlight the search term in each document in a preview pane. Is there a way to set up Spotlight to do the same, or is there 3rd party software which will do so? I often have to search 1000s of e-mails or documents for a name that might appear in 150 of them, and I don't want to have to search through each document separately to find the term.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
B

I've never used it but I believe [google desktop for mac|http://desktop.google.com/mac> does it. i don't know of any spotlight enhancements that would highlight search terms in search results.
Message was edited by: V.K.

Imac 27 late 2009 - since november the processor (intel core 2) is continuously surcharging, music stops, movies freeze...

Hi,
Since November the processor of my iMac is very easily surcharged. I've looked in several posts and I discovered about the spotlight question, so I've disabled it since I don't really use it anyway. The problem wasn't fixed. Then, reading that it was a lion problem I tried to go back to snow leopard, but the problem still wasn't fixed at all. So I've been back to lion, I even added several gigas of RAM, now I have 16G. the problem is still unsolved. Even if I'm just listening to some music or watching a movie with every other application closed, from time to time the music stops several times, movies freeze etc. It seems like it's not the operative system, it's not the RAM, it's not a real surcharge, and when I look in the activity monitor nothing really shows up. I am clueless, but it's really really annoying.
Thank you in advance for every suggestion...

OWC has an upgrade program for 2010/2011 iMacs where they figured out how to replace hard drives without tripping up the sensor the iMac is expecting. See http://blog.macsales.com/11638-owc-turnkey-program-for-2011-imacs-announced .
Some have talked about installing a HDD fan control program to turn down the fan, and some don't consider that a solution.
In Germany, someone came up with a custom circuit that keeps everyting in working order: http://www.gravis.de/blog/imac-2011-freie-festplattenwahl-dank-gravis-cbreeze/
I've got to believe that someone will develop a more easily accessible option as more iMacs need hard drive replacements.

I have a question about troubleshooting Spotlight.

I have a MacBook running 10.7.5, 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB HD, with about 173 GB free. Clean, virus-free, spyware-free system.
Recently, the MacBook began freezing up. I thought, at first, it was just Firefox, but it began doing it randomly, regardless of the activity. The freeze-ups would not only happen during regular use, but even during reboots or when starting in Recovery. I began to suspect that the freeze-ups were related to Spotlight when, after several reboots today, I happened to click on Spotlight to quickly access a diagnostic app. I saw that Spotlight was "indexing". The fan was running. I began to wonder about that, as I do notice the fan running a lot, lately. Rather than run any Terminal commands, I opened System Preferences ----> Spotlight-----> Privacy, clicked the + button and dragged my hard drive's icon into the field, overlooking the warning that Spotlight wouldn't be able to return any searches. Suddenly, my MacBook has not only stopped freezing up, the fan's no longer constantly running and I can now watch videos on YouTube. (During the past week or so, videos would come to a screeching halt and begin "broken record repeating" and the cursor would freeze up.) That's no longer happening; videos are fine.
My question is this: I realize that it's probably not the best solution to keep my hard drive out of Spotlight's grasp, the Spotlight app is there for a reason. But obviously, Spotlight is causing my MacBook to freeze up with all this indexing. How would one go about isolating the offensive file, script, etc., that's sending Spotlight into its frenzy? I'm reluctant to move the hard drive's icon out of the privacy field to ferret this out because the laptop will certainly freeze up about every 10 minutes. But I suppose I must, in order to detect the issue?
Thanks!

If you have had this problem while booted ino recovery mode, it's not a Spotlight issue. If your hard drive is failing, that could cause the problems you describe. Do you have good backups? If not, your first order of business needs to be backing up all data that you don't want to lose. Once you have done that, you can start troubleshooting.
Regarding troubleshooting, you can check the SMART status of your hard drive in Disk Utility, but it's important to note that failing hard drives can easily have "verified" SMART status.
It would also be worth repairing the hard drive with Disk Utility. If the hard drive is actually failing, though, repairing won't do squat... the drive will have to be replaced.
Your problems involving Spotlight could also have been caused by a corrupt Spotlight index. Since you added the entire hard drive to the Privacy pane, removing it will cause Spotlight to completely rebuild the index, which would solve that problem... if that were the problem.
Also, you mention that your machine is "clean, virus-free, spyware-free," which suggests that you may have been using cleaning utilities and anti-virus software. Regarding the former, that's a bad idea - see The myth of the dirty Mac. As for anti-virus software, what software are you using? Some anti-virus software is good, while others can bring your Mac to its knees.

New "Questions Answered" Spotlight Award

I'm pleased to announce our new "Questions Answered" Spotlight Award. The first awardee will be recognized in March.
Questions Answered Award: This award is intended to recognize a Support Community member whose contributions have resulted in answering the most number of questions on our community. At the end of each month, that member who has the most number of “Answered Questions” will be recognized with a community Spotlight Award.
Award Duration: 1 month
Please visit ourSpotlight Awards page for more information on the Program.
Cheers,
Dan

Hello Dan, I hope you're well.
Why does it say 'unanswered questions' rather than questions answered, or is it a totally different award?
It is like the opposite almost!
https://supportforums.cisco.com/community/netpro/top-contributors/spotlight-awards
Please rate useful posts & remember to mark any solved questions as answered. Thank you.

Spotlight Comments - questions, limits and opinions

My wife and I are a little behind the curve. We updated our MacBook Pros, MacPro and PowerMac G5 to Leopard early this year in part due to the fact that my testing showed that Spotlight Comments are persistent on our home ethernet - If I put identifying comments in a file's Get Info > Spotlight Comments box while it is on my MacBook's Desktop, then move it to a "file server" (a shared drive on the PowerMac or MacPro), my wife can see and modify the Comment from her MacBook. The comments almost seem to be part of the file itself (yes, Francine, we know they really are not) unlike the volatile pre-X Finder Comments. We do not normally have any Windows machines on our network and when we do we certainly do not use one as a file server. We're pretty much vanilla Apple.
Now, on to my questions:
1 - if not in the file itself, where are the Spotlight Comments actually stored? If they're in a folder's .DS_Store files, then they would disappear if you nuke those files (like when trying to fix a folder that is not properly displaying its contents) and that has not been my experience. I know that you can use mdls in the Terminal to show the comment and the other useful stuff that appears in Get Info's More Info field, but can this data get separated from the file it is connected to, or is it in that mystical Resource Fork? I'm not a developer (JavaScript is about as much code as I can handle) so I don't need the gory details. I just want to know if we can nuke Comments by unintentionally deleting some invisible file.
2 - What are the limits in Spotlight Comments? Are there any? How many characters will that field take? I am asking this since I have been trying to put info concerning an image into its Spotlight Comment field and once I close the Get Info window the Comment is gone. If I check with mdls in Terminal the image's kMDItemFinderComment field is not even created. I have been trimming off hunks of characters in the Comment and am now below 700 but it still won't take it (the file is not locked, I have full control of it, and it doesn't appear to matter what files' or folders' Comments field I try to paste it into). Is this limit documented anywhere, because I've been Googling for it all morning with no matches.
3 - if not Spotlight Comments, then what? I see DefaultFolder has an option to write Comments as "OpenMeta Tags" but what little I could understand upon looking that up made it sound like they're Spotlight Comments that are embedded into the file itself - even files that do not normally have a spot for Comments. Putting the description in the filename is much easier in X than previously, but gets a bit unwieldy very quickly. Many (but not all) image formats can accept descriptions in things like EXIF, but doing so changes its Modification Date and screws up our sorting...
4 - only tangentially related: how many years did it take for Apple to put in Safari a function that we made use of all the time in Netscape & IE in pre-X times: put the source URL of a download in the Comment field. Now why can't the Mozilla team put that in Firefox? It's not like I haven't posted that as a feature request multiple times...
I know that file "tagging" is a hot topic and I do not expect a real solution here, but if someone can confirm that there is a character limit in a file's Spotlight Comment field and let us know where or if it's documented...
Message was edited by: Notary Sojak

UPDATE - apparently once a file's kMDItemFinderComment field is created (I got the Comment to stick once I was below 600 characters) it can take more characters. I jut replaced the successful 595 character comment with the full 735 character comment I had initially been unable to add and it is visible from all the Macs.

Question about Time Capsule and Spotlight

I have a simple question about using Time Capsule and Spotlight. Is everything that goes on to Time Capsule indexed into Spotlight? It would appear so but when I search for something (that is still on my hard drive and also backed up to Spotlight) only the local copy appears. Would it be that it finds the closest copy and if that were not there it would point to the Time Capsule copy? Thanks in advance for clarifying this for me.

The automatic setup in the airport utility has changed something.
Is the line down to the TC from the express dotted.. in other words is wireless??
Funny stuff happens.
Please post the screenshots of the 3 pages from the airport utility setup for both airport express and TC..
Make sure wireless is set to off in the express.
Both should be set to dhcp on the internet tab and both set to off bridge mode on the network tab.
So for example the bridge on the network tab.
The summary page can also be a help.
There is a half summary page when you click the item in the airport utility.
There is also a fully summary page, when you hold option key and double click the TC icon for example.

Leopard Spotlight in 10.4, question for the aficianados

Upgraded all the macs in the lab to 10.5 about a month ago. Love Spotlight, the networking and screen share, but can't live without Classic Apps MDP and CG1.3 on my own machine (last of the G5's).
The single biggest issue preventing me running back to 10.4 is that Spotlight in 10.5 has a single button that lets me search for a file by name (the only kind of search I ever do), as opposed to the 10.4 system where this requires navigation through drop down menus.
My first question is, is there some way I can have the Spotlight interface from 10.5 in 10.4, is there any set of files I can copy over to achieve this.
My second question is whether there is any way in 10.5 to make find by file name the default. This would save me taking my hands off the keyboard and reaching for the track ball to click that SOB button.
Thanks in advance for your help.

To be honest, I found the combo to Search By Name by accident. I was using some program that used that key combo for some function (don't remember exactly where or what), but I was in finder instead of the program, and up popped the search window with the Name field selected. I remember thinking that this was much more important than the task I was doing, and wrote it down.
I haven't seem much as far as official documentation, but the combo was described in Mac User back in December 2007: http://www.macuser.com/software/thefindbynamegame.php
And Francine Schwieder mentions it here on the forum: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1928465&tstart=0
and she has written an article about Spotlight, here:
http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/Leopard/leospot.html
I'm glad you find it useful too

Spotlight Server - several questions

A small law office that has it's shared documents on an internal and an external usb drive, wants to use Spotlight to find documents. So…
My research suggests that SL Spotlight server is broken and useless. Is that true? If true, then we can stop right here and maybe someone can recommend an alternative solution.
If it will work (even if requiring some effort), where can I find clear information on setting it up to work. My search has not found clear documentation.
If it does work, what are the caveats that I need to be aware of?
Thanks, in advance, for the information.

Hmmm…I realize I didn't give quite enough information (result of being tired while trying to work :-( ). So…
They have a Mac mini with SL Server installed. There are less than ten clients (all Macs) attached to it on the LAN. All of their law documents are stored internally on the server – inside a folder dedicated for it. They expect to be able to enter a search into their client Spotlight and have it search the client document folder, on the server (rightfully so).
It seems that there needs to be some set-up for Spotlight Server on the SL Server. However, when looking for the documentation for setting that up, I came across a large number of posts effectively saying that Spotlight Server is a good idea that does not work – not without significant work-arounds. However, those posts seem to be relatively older and may not reflect the current state of the service - thus my questions.
To answer your question, it is just a folder shared out of SL server – I think that means AFP.
Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Hi Forum, can u please help? iRecently bought a mac pro & my garageband 11 was working fine but now it's showing a question mark in the dock but it won't open. I think it may have been accidentally trashed. I've searched the trash & spotlighted. What now?

Hi Forum, can u please help? iRecently bought a macbook pro and garageband 11 was working fine but now it's showing a question mark in the dock and it won't open. I think it may have been accidentally trashed. I've searched the trash and spotlighted but don't know what to do next. Any ideas? Thanks.

How did you install GarageBand on your Mac? Did it come preinstalled with the other iLife applications?
If your MacOS supports the AppStore, you should be able to redownload GarageBand from the AppStore, see this support Article: OS X: About OS X Recovery on how to download again:
Double-click the App Store icon in the dock.
Enter your Apple ID and password.
Click Purchases.
If you haven't previously accepted your bundled iLife applications within the Mac App Store, you should see your iLife applications appear in the Accept portion of the screen. Click Accept.
You may be asked for your Apple ID and password once again. Your iLife applications now move to the Purchased section. These applications are part of the software that came with your Lion based computer. Your account will not be charged for them. Click Install to complete installation of your applications.
Regards
Léonie

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