There is Boolean search in Spotlight. Ipse dixit has a couple of articles that discuss undocumented Boolean searches in Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger’s Spotlight. We’ve condensed them down and tested them on Mac OS X 10.4.1, Build 8B15. The following works:
• NOT=! – Searching for apple!mac also tells Spotlight to find everything with “apple” but NOT “mac”
• OR=| – Searching for apple|mac tells Spotlight to find everything with “apple” OR “mac”
• AND=space – Searching for apple mac tells Spotlight to find everything with “apple” AND “mac”
Full articles with discussions here and here.
MacDailyNews Note: If you find other undocumented Spotlight features, please add ’em below. Happy hunting!
• NOT=! – Searching for apple!mac also tells Spotlight to find everything with “apple” but NOT “mac”
phew …
filibuster!bondage …
NOW I can search political issues with my kids.
• MONOPOLY=! – Searching for on MSN!Searching on this site only adds to the power of the devil.
• MACHATER=| – Searching for Google|all of their products come out later for MacOS than for windows
but what about modulus?
It seems like mac(-apple) is the way to do “apple” but NOT “mac”
from: http://www.hiram.nl/ipsedixit/artikel/801/the-boolean-not-in-spotlight
“The syntax seems to be lenin(-stalin). This will find documents mentioning Lenin, but ignoring, thankfully, Stalin. “
eh great.. wininfo geeks are gonna go nuts over this.. i won’t use it.. i still don’t use boolean even in google searching..
MDN – FIX THE STORY
its properly…
(-foo) = NOT foo
foo|bar = foo OR bar
foo bar = foo AND bar
thanks
Longhorn!.NET
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1820607,00.asp
Care to explain this article Sputnik (wherever you are…)?
You can also quickly search only by filename by enclosing the search in quotes. e.g.
“my file”
you spelled fubar wrong.
foo is a faux function name and bar is its argument.
btw: for these to work, you must NOT put in a space ” ” between the regular AND expression and the other two
so if you’re looking for the script for The Empire Strikes Back, you’d put in:
Luke Leia(-Greedo)(-Ewoks)(-Grevious)
because
Luke Leia (-Greedo) (-Ewoks) (-Grevious)
does NOT return anything.
so the actual syntax is
baz bar(-foo)
= baz AND Bar, but NOT foo
baz foo|bar
= baz AND foo OR bar
foo bar
= foo AND bar
“foo is a faux function name and bar is its argument”
Agreed, but Dank is also correct. The original usage of the word is the acronym popularised by the U.S. Marine Corps:
FUBAR = Fucked Up Beyond All Repair
Which is closely related to another Marine acronym:
SNAFU = Situation Normal – All Fucked Up
Note that the Marines’ difficult mission (storming heavily defended coastlines) is preternaturally subject to Murphy’s Law (I’ve heard claims that the original Murphy was a Marine), and as such they expect things to go wrong. It is for this reason that Marines are typically so highly disciplined, and why the most prized quality in a Marine officer is the ability to innovate under extreme pressure (courage and discipline are givens). As a former Army man, I used to kid my many jarhead friends, but I have the deepest respect for the Corps and its members, God bless ’em.
look, marines used to be my customers…all right? so there’s nothing but love the boys i was looking over, protecting them from afar… from the black sky…
but come on… this is a NERD SITE, not fscking R. Lee Ermy time.
http://jamesthornton.com/jargon/jargon.html#metasyntactic variable
http://jamesthornton.com/jargon/jargon.html#foo
http://jamesthornton.com/jargon/jargon.html#bar
http://jamesthornton.com/jargon/jargon.html#baz
ps: i didn’t even look up the last 3 – cause i know that they are just there.
and DANK is not one of the metasyntactic variables… sorry.
Also check out “Amberyl’s Mush Manual” on line. Following a lot of maqinframe coding tradition, the manual (for multi-player real time text RPGs) has used the “foo bar” terminology in code examples for more than a decade.
What’s with all the nonsense syntax for boolean expressions in searches? I mean how hard is it Apple to simple use standard, universal boolean expressions for boolean searches? You’d think this was some arcane shit put together by a bunch of geeks for their own personal use.
Suggestion Apple: If someone wants to find “lunch” but not “lunch money” just allow a search like: “lunch NOT money”.
Geez!
ZEKE!
Another MUSHer? Coolness
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I still use Linux to run my MUSHes though; they’re more suited to the headless box. Recent TM3.x have run fine under OSX though; I simply prefer to shove the dumb brute work off on a machine that I’m seldom interactive with. IIRC, early OSX shipped with a somewhat wonky GBDM, which may have made me leery…
This reminds me of something that I’ve thought of during past Keynote addresses… various sites do semi-realtime updates and possibly an IRC channel. Seems to me that a special purpose MUSH would be ideally suited to this… and all OSX users have at least a basic telnet app (hell, I use telnet in Terminal.app for all of my MU* needs. Then again, I’m perhaps a bit of a masochist). The channels system and/or the Auditorium flag could be used to great advantage, methinks… with a pretty damned low bandwidth footprint.
If you or anyone else are interested in pursuing this idea further, email me at mdn@disorganized.org – if there’s enough interest I’ll set up a MUSH for further discussion.
– ~ – Dual 500Mhz G4 (Panther), PII 400 MHz (Slackware) – ~ –