MacOS – Non-recursive spotlight search

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When using the Spotlight search at the top right of a finder window, I often want the search to be non-recursive, i.e. only look at files in that specific directory, not any directories within it. Is this possible?

Best Answer

As far as I know, unfortunately it's not possible to do this.

Strangely, I also set the 'Document Container' criteria within Spotlight and it wouldn't show any results at all.

This is extremely poor behaviour, I agree. You can give Apple feedback on OS X (from which you can post feedback on Spotlight) here.

Related Solutions

MacOS – How to increase size of the Spotlight search results window

Have you looked at using 'Alfred' as search tool - It's free on the App Store and very flexible, and has a wider results view. If you try it, take a little time to get familiar with the options - I find it a fantastic time saver.

MacOS – Search a folder that is excluded from Spotlight

If you're happy with the terminal you can use the find command.

Something like opening Terminal in Utilities.

cd <folder name>
find . -name <whatever you're searching for>

Once found you can open it up with open

So, I can do something like:

alex@smiley:~|⇒  cd Desktop
alex@smiley:~/Desktop|⇒  find . -name Mac*
./Mac Pro.spx
alex@smiley:~/Desktop|⇒  open Mac\ Pro.spx

Notice that I used the * as a wildcard to match all files starting with Mac

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – How to increase size of the Spotlight search results window

MacOS – Search a folder that is excluded from Spotlight

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