How can I use Regular Expressions in Spotlight on Mountain Lion?
I want to use my knowledge of regular expressions to make my search results more exact.
MacOS – How to use Regular Expressions in Spotlight on Mountain Lion
macossearchspotlight
Related Solutions
You can use this in your search to search for files with 'query' in their name: name:query
For more info about Spotlight commands, you can take a look at an excerpt of Mac OS X: The Missing Manual.
Finally, I found a hack! I wrote a blog post about this which you can find here (in Chinese).
These are the key steps:
Open the file with Xcode:
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlight.plistIf you do not have this file, change the order System Preferences → Spotlight which will cause the OS to create it.
Within the
orderedItemsnode, add a Dictionary item as follows:
- Save the
.plistfile. Open System Preferences → Spotlight, you will find a blank entry, this is what we had added above. You can drag it like other entries to change the order as you like.
You are done! Now type a word in spotlight and see what happened.
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Best Answer
Apple's tools for accessing the Spotlight index (Spotlight itself and the
mdfindcommand) don't offer any regex options, nor do I know of any 3rd party tools that offer that (I'm not actually sure Apple has APIs that would make that possible).However, the
mdfindcommand does offer a much more powerful interface than the GUI Spotlight search. It offers proper binary operators and finer grained control over what metadata you search. Check out The Power of mdfind (via archive.org) for some good information, as well as the mdfind man page.