Mac OS X Spotlight - is mine broken?

[Ledgem]

I know Mac OS X help is relatively scarce here but I had a question about this. Linux users may be able to give me a hand here, because I noticed something similar when using Beagle. I hate to say it but both experiences make me wish I could pull out Windows' find function.

Here's the problem - it's practically useless. I want to find a folder, and I know the name of the folder. I type in the folder name, and get nothing, literally. Part of the problem may be that the folder resides on an external drive (or so I think). The drive has been indexed by Spotlight and should theoretically be searchable, though. Note that I don't always have the drive on with the system. What's going on?

I also have to wonder whether Spotlight is broken in other ways. I've used some of the features to narrow down the searches, particularly when looking for system directories (which are normally hidden - I presume you need to make it specifically look for these directories) but they don't seem to be terribly effective, either. I've heard people rave about how wonderful Spotlight is but for me it's nothing better than a sort of "Start Menu" - it picks out applications rather well but it's awful for finding folders or files.

There are no directories listed in Spotlight's privacy tab (tells Spotlight not to index those areas). I'm using OS X 10.5.2; originally the system was 10.4.6, and at 10.4.10 it was upgraded to 10.5.0. I've used Google for this and people seem to have the complete opposite problems ("Spotlight won't stop searching my external drive" or "Spotlight won't stop indexing") which makes me wonder...

So, any suggestions? In the mean time I'll be off hunting for that folder on my own Thanks in advance!

[Epyon9283]

Make sure indexing is enabled for your external drives (sometimes for whatever reason it gets disabled).

mdutil -sv /Volumes/whatevervolumename

If indexing is enabled you can try forcing a rebuild of the index.

mdutil -E /Volumes/whatevervolumename

If you want to search in /System, /Library, or ~/Library you'll need to specifically search for system files. Start a search in Finder and select System Files as a search attribute. Make sure its set to include.

I haven't really had any issues with Spotlight not searching stuff in Leopard. The interface sucks (no sorting options in the finder search window) but it does seem to find stuff.

[WanderingKnight]

Why don't you use locate? It's a Unix tool, so you probably have it available on OS X. It supports regular expressions, and it's incredibly fast and effective (you have to update the database manually with updatedb, though you can set up a daily cron job, which is what most Linux distros do).

Honestly, I remove Beagle as soon as I find it in any distro. All the pretty GUIs in the world can't beat locate when it comes to finding files and folders.

[Kyuusai]

Until you get the indexes built for spotlight or locate, there's always the good ol' find utilty.

In the terminal:

find path -name 'name'

As with locate, regular expressions are supported, so...

find ~/ -name '*dangedfolder*'
would find any files in your home directory whose name contained 'dangedfolder'. Since your file is on an external drive, your path would be /Volumes/drivename

Originally Posted by WanderingKnight

Honestly, I remove Beagle as soon as I find it in any distro. All the pretty GUIs in the world can't beat locate when it comes to finding files and folders.

I agree 100% for filename searches (although Spotlight is now fast enough that I use it on OS X for that purpose).

The real power of Spotlight and Beagle, though, are their more sophisticated active management of the database combined with a pluggable architecture for searching the contents of files. As of OS X 10.5, I've finally found Spotlight to be worth its existence. I hope Beagle can catch up soon (if it hasn't already).

[Kyuusai]

Double post. Rats.

[Ledgem]

Originally Posted by Epyon9283

Make sure indexing is enabled for your external drives (sometimes for whatever reason it gets disabled).

mdutil -sv /Volumes/whatevervolumename

If indexing is enabled you can try forcing a rebuild of the index.

mdutil -E /Volumes/whatevervolumename

If you want to search in /System, /Library, or ~/Library you'll need to specifically search for system files. Start a search in Finder and select System Files as a search attribute. Make sure its set to include.

I haven't really had any issues with Spotlight not searching stuff in Leopard. The interface sucks (no sorting options in the finder search window) but it does seem to find stuff.

Indexing was enabled, and it's rebuilding now so we'll see how it goes. Regardless, I've found that the special modifiers to the search don't seem to work. I accidentally left it out to say that when I try to search for System Folders (which is a selection modifier you can add to "narrow down searches" I suppose) nothing comes up. Really weird stuff.

As an aside, may I ask where you learned of all these commands? I was excited to read about "OS X 10.5 - The Missing Manual" reviewed on Slashdot (or Neowin, forgot which) but it seems to be really, really basic stuff. "How to use Mail, how to use Mail to send emails, how to play movies" - that sort of thing. I was really hoping that it'd go over advanced options, how to tweak the system, important system files, advanced Terminal commands and usage, but it seems to be made more for the average user and less for power users. Any recommendations on where to get information like that?

Originally Posted by WanderingKnight

Why don't you use locate? It's a Unix tool, so you probably have it available on OS X. It supports regular expressions, and it's incredibly fast and effective (you have to update the database manually with updatedb, though you can set up a daily cron job, which is what most Linux distros do).

Honestly, I remove Beagle as soon as I find it in any distro. All the pretty GUIs in the world can't beat locate when it comes to finding files and folders.

You totally hate GUIs, don't you I don't understand why you can't just use those commands with a GUI front-end. I mean, I type in a search term and hit "find" - just run it and pipe back the results. I know that for OS X there was something called Quicksilver that everyone was using, but it wasn't compatible with OS X 10.5 when I checked a few months ago and some people even claimed that Spotlight was so good now that Quicksilver wasn't really needed anymore. Lucky them. Pathetic as it may be, I'm considering opening Windows in a VM, sharing the external drive root directory with it, and using the find function there. Sigh...

[WanderingKnight]

I mean, I type in a search term and hit "find" - just run it and pipe back the results.

It's not much different with locate. You just type "locate <folder or filename>", hit enter, and you get a list of hits almost instantaneously, since it only parses a text file with your system's whole directory tree. You can use options to specify where to look in, but it's not required.

locate is such a simple program it's almost beautiful. That's why command line tools are very nice to work with--they are extremely simple programs, and they tend to do only a single task, but they do it well.

[Ledgem]

I meant, why can't the GUI search engines just use that command in a CLI and then interpret the results back into te GUI? I'm not a programmer but it seems like it should be possible and perhaps even relatively simple...

[WanderingKnight]

I'm not an expert on how GUI indexers like Beagle or Spotlight work, either. Precisely for that reason, though, I tend to avoid them.

[Ledgem]

Well, here's the good news: after re-indexing the drive, it found a file with the name of the folder that I'm searching for. So now it seems to be looking on the drive, which is great. The bad news is that it didn't find the folder, which either means that it's still broken or that the folder exists on my other drive ("Mario, your princes is in another castle!"), which is double the size of this one, NTFS (can it even be indexed? mdutil claims it has no index), and... well, I guess I'll load up Windows to search it. Bah...

Thanks for the help, everyone. Those terminal commands to force indexing will likely be very useful in the future.

[killmoms]

Yeah, you can't Spotlight index an NTFS volume since they're not writable in OS X. Curse you, NTFS!

[Epyon9283]

Yeah... You could try using macfuse and ntfs3g to get writable NTFS but I wouldn't bother. OS X only indexes native partitions.

Spotlight also has a command line interface for finding files called mdfind. Its much, much faster than the find command. It also has an up-to-date index unlike slocate. The slocate cron job generally only runs once daily.

mdfind searches everything by default so you get your system folder results. Only problem is that the drive needs to be indexed

[Epyon9283]

http://images.apple.com/server/macos...dmin_v10.5.pdf

This has a lot of useful command line stuff for OS X in it. Much of it isn't Server specific.