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wildcard in spotlight?

Hi all 🙂


i have a difficulty with being able to sort and search my thousands of files by name, because somehow accidentally many of them got named with a space preceding the letters. (so for example, "water" might come way before "cats", if there's a space before water in its file name.


So i would like to do a spotlight search by typing in something like: (space)(wildcard).


Any simple ideas? Thanks!

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6)

Posted on Nov 14, 2017 9:55 PM

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Posted on Nov 16, 2017 12:55 AM

Good evening coatli,

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities!

Thanks for your question. If you have accidentally placed a space in front of some file names, the easiest way to resolve that issue would be to:
1) Open Finder and look at all your files (Go > All My Files).
2) Switch to List view (View > As List).
2) The files that have a space in front of the name will be listed first, followed by files that start with numbers.
3) Right-click and choose Rename.
4) Delete the space in front of the first character of the file name. It will automatically move to the correct location in the list.
Take care.

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wildcard in spotlight?

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