December 11, 2002
Finding files by their contents
Posted by bopuc at December 11, 2002 11:08 AM
From The Mac OS X Help:
The Finder can search the contents of files for specific text.To search for the content of items, choose Find from the File menu. Type the word or phrase you want to search for in the "content includes" text box, then click Search.
If the Finder doesn't find an item you expected to find, you may need to update the index. To update an index, select the disk or folder that contains the files you want to search and choose Get Info from the File menu. Click Content Index, then click Index Now.
Now, I've always known that MacOS runs a content index... nightly in fact, if you turn it on... (I remember the ex and I would howl everynight at 12 when sitting at her PowerBook and the Indexing would start... wait that sounds funny.. whatever...)
Anyways, yeah, I always thought of it as an annoyance, and I never searched by comments so what the heck...
But you know (listening Karl?), I can setup to make this thing search my mail folders... and my IM/SMS archives... and my Bookmarks folders... Oooh...
So now I wonder why Apple split off Sherlock into just a web-search-tool when they could have turned in on itself and presented local data in a web-happy way? (Show me my email to Joe last week and let me click on the links again... etc...)
To be investigated...
Comments
Is it possible to have automatic content indexing in Mac OS X? This is a feature I do miss, coming from the classic Mac OS. Thanks for taking this into consideration.
Posted by: jan adriaenssens at April 23, 2003 08:55 AM