Spotlight does not find file

spotlight

I have the file Rprofile.site in /Macintosh HD/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/

Searching 'Rprofile.site' in Spotlight does not find the file, and I have to manually go to the folder containing the file.

I'm on a Mac book pro using 10.8.2

Is there a way I can find the file using Spotlight?

Best Answer

The problem is some folders are intentionally left out from the global spotlight search on the menubar.

For example, /Library and /Users/*/Library, one of the ways to search in these directories is to navigate to these directory in Finder, and search in the Spotlight field in the upper-right corner.

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MacOS – How to locate a file in Spotlight using folder and file name

If you're comfortable opening the terminal you could run the command

locate ABC/readme.txt

and it will give you the full file path to any files on your machine that are named readme.txt in a folder named ABC.

While you're there you can copy and past the path as an argument to the open command and it will open it for you.

Taking it one step further you can use the output of locate as the arguments for open with xargs

locate ABC/readme.txt | xargs open

Will open all files that have ABC/readme.txt on your machine just as if you had double-clicked them.

Spotlight Cmd+Enter to open containing folder does not work

There is a bug in 10.8.2 that intermittently makes revealing files in Finder stop working. When that happens, Archive Utility also stops responding whenever you try to extract archives.

As a workaround, you can terminate the appleeventsd process from Activity Monitor or with sudo killall -kill appleeventsd (without -kill the process is sent a TERM signal and other processes stop responding). The issue will probably return in a few days or hours though.

Best Answer

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MacOS – How to locate a file in Spotlight using folder and file name

Spotlight Cmd+Enter to open containing folder does not work

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