How to search "*"/"?" literally in Finder spotlight

Spotlight doesn't use those as wildcards, as far as I know. If I search for ? or * I get the files I created that have those symbols in the name.

You may be able to make a better search in the Finder. Type Cmd-F (or cmd-ctrl-shift-F for just searching file names).

You can add criteria such as name contains to search anywhere in the name.

everwisher wrote:

This is not the case you said, bro. I do have a bunch of file with their names containing "*"or"?", but when I typed in the two characters in Finder spotlight, nothing was given in the main area.

Then there is something wrong with your Spotlight index, bro. Spotlight doesn't use wildcards. If you typed both characters, you would have to have a name with both of those in the same order.

The Spotlight search has limited ordering abilities. Use the Finder as I stated earlier.

If you want to search for file names that contain * or ?, then use the finder.

In the Criteria, hold down the Option key and click the … button at the end of the criteria line (it was a + button)

Leave it set for "Any"

Remove the top, kind is any criteria by clicking on the - button (however, you could just leave it).

Below "Any", change the Criteria to Name contains *.

Click the + button next to that line and change it to Name contains ?

In Spotlight, or a given Finder Window's search pane, you can do the following with the name keyword which can find files/folders with as little as a single character or full name. In the following, the characters are searched for literally, and not to be confused as wildcards:

name:*

name:?

name:/

The top hits will be those filenames containing those characters. If two of these characters are adjacent in the filename, then you can specify both instead of the single character examples above.

The only character that Finder rejects is the ':' character as that is reserved for the Finder HFS file path separators.