exclude folders in a search with smart folders

To do NOT searches, Option-Click on the + button at the end of the criterion line. (The one that defaults to *Kind is Any*.) In the new line, select *None of the following are true*. You can add more lines and criteria to do complex Boolean searches.

When you bring up the Find window, just leave kind as any, then in the "Search for:" box at the top type in your search term, and also add what you want to exclude with "NOT" and whatever it may be. Thus if I wanted to find all files containing "geranium" in the file name or content, I would enter this:

geranium NOT Folder

I would get all files with geranium in the file name, plus all html files mentioning geranium, as well as text files with the word in the content, but would not get any folders. If I wanted to also exclude certain other things I would arrange window in List view, click on the "Kind" column and note what other files are showing up that I'm not interested in. For instance, suppose I don't want aliases either. I would then amend my Search for field to exclude those as well:

geranium NOT Folder NOT alias

You can refine things to your heart's content using this method.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

Just to add, Spotlight, in Leopard at least, supports most, if not all, boolean search operators (using quotes, AND, NOT, OR, etc...).

In System Preferences for Spotlight, add your HD to the exclusion (privacy) list, quit Sys Prefs, and than remove teh HD from the list. This will force Spotlight to reindex the drive.

You should also bear in mind that the location of what you are looking for matters. If the folder is inside of a system folder you must explicitly tell Spotlight to search system items. Take a look at the article I wrote on Spotlight:

http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/Leopard/leospot.html

Be sure to click the link to see the second page as well, which has more examples.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

Also, see 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 excluded by the default structure.