[tallscot]

So does spotlight search network drives?
Yes.

[tallscot]

I don't speak now of any confusion between "Name" and "Filename," though I agree with Rob that the vast majority of individual users will see "Name" and think it refers to the file name -- and understandably so.
Name covers filename, but other things too.
Reading the Spotlight Help:

In reply to:

---

Searching for items in the Finder
The Finder's Find command lets you search your entire computer and any volumes attached to it for documents, folders, and applications. Because it uses Spotlight, the Find command can search your files' contents, as well as their other attributes.
In addition to searching the usual attributes, such as the file's name and creation date, you can search the wide variety of information stored about your files. For example, you can search your photos for those taken with a specific camera model. Or you can search your audio files for those performed by a specific musician. To see the specialized information stored for a type of file, select one of those files, choose File > Get Info, and look at the attributes in the More Info section.

In the Finder, choose File > Find. You can start searching immediately by typing in the Search field, or refine your search.

To search a specific location, click that location. Click Others to select a location that's not in the list.
To search a particular attribute, click the Add () button to the right of the Save button and choose an attribute from the the first pop-up menu below the list of locations. With the controls that appear, specify the search criteria. To see the types of attributes available for a specific type of file, choose a file of that type, select File > Get Info, and look at the More Info section.

If the pop-up menu does not contain the attribute you want, choose Other and select an item from the search attribute list. To add this item to the pop-up menu for later searches, select "Add to Favorites."

To refine your search with additional attributes, click the Add () button. Click the Delete (-) button to remove one.
Select a found item to see its path at the bottom of the window. Double-click a folder or volume in the path to open it.
To save your search as a Smart Folder, click Save.
If you cannot find a file, the Find command may not be searching in its location. Try the following:

Check the list of locations to make sure you selected the correct one.
In Spotlight preferences, click Privacy. If you think the file might be in one of the locations in the list, select that location and click the Delete (-) button. The Find command does not search items in Spotlight's privacy list.
To search locations that contain primarily system files, such as the root-level System or Library folders, you must select them explicitly by clicking Others in the list of locations. You can search these locations by name only.
To search for items that are not files, folders or applications, click the Spotlight icon in the menu bar. Spotlight also searches calendar events, mail messages, Safari bookmarks, and much more.

---

Interesting tidbit about root-level system files.

[tallscot]

Rob,
After reading the Spotlight Help, I read how you search these folders using Spotlight. It explains it in there. You have to click on "Other..." in the location bar to search root-level system folders and it says you can only search by name.
It works for me.

[griffman]

Yes, which means my statement's still true -- Spotlight doesn't index those folders. That's why you can search on filename only, and why you can't reach them through the Command-Space interface. So in the case where Spotlight has no index, the machine reverts to find by name only. Sorry if I wasn't clearer about that; I knew you could search them by filename (though I forgot about it when talking about the Terminal; probably because I almost find it easier at that point than using the Other pop-up and navigating /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif ).
The bigger issue is that Spotlight avoids these folders entirely, which means you can't ever search by content. As I hinted at in the previous post, there are ways of getting this done, but they're not simple...
-rob.
Edit: Modified the layout, changed a bit of the content

[tallscot]

Yes, which means my statement's still true
Except for the part about having to use the Terminal.

[griffman]

Yes, and I edited my post just after I hit Submit to denote that. Mea culpa. The Others pop-up will let you add non-Spotlighted folders, inside of which you can then do name searching. Which is fine if you want to search by name (and don't mind clicking on Others... every time you need to search there).
-rob.

[jmincey]

Tallscot, Rob is the editor (and former owner) of a highly regarded and popular tip site for OS X. Meanwhile, you are a programmer. The two of you are hardly typical of the Mac user. I'm less and less impressed with the idea that some things can be done in Spotlight. Okay -- I'll stipulate to this. Likewise, will you stipulate that I could write a shell script that would parse all text files and -- with the use of sed and awk -- fashion a report back to the user? It can be done, right?
Presumably you wouldn't recommend to the average user that they buy a book on UNIX shell scripting and on text parsing languages like PERL -- right? So let's get on board with the "cause" of making Spotlight more usable to non-power users (and, for that matter, to power users and programmers). I simply can't go along with the idea that the UI of Spotlight can't be improved without adding complexity and confusion to the user, (in which case the UI would not really have been improved in the first place).

[tallscot]

Yes, and I edited my post just after I hit Submit to denote that. Mea culpa. The Others pop-up will let you add non-Spotlighted folders, inside of which you can then do name searching. Which is fine if you want to search by name (and don't mind clicking on Others... every time you need to search there).
I was only addressing the statement that you can't search for the Adobe caches in Spotlight. He didn't say that you can but it's not as easy.

[tallscot]

In reply to:

---

Tallscot, you are a programmer who admits to having some difficulty (at times) with more complex Boolean expressions. Rob is the editor (and former owner) of a highly regarded and popular tip site for OS X. The two of you are hardly typical of the Mac user. I'm less and less impressed with the idea that some things can be done in Spotlight. Okay -- I'll stipulate to this. Likewise, will you stipulate that I could write a shell script that would parse all text files and -- with the use of sed and awk -- fashion a report back to the user? It can be done, right?
Presumably you wouldn't recommend to the average user that they buy a book on UNIX shell scripting and on text parsing languages like PERL -- right? So let's get on board with the "cause" of making Spotlight more usable to non-power users (and, for that matter, to power users and programmers). I simply can't go along with the idea that the UI of Spotlight can't be improved without adding complexity and confusion to the user, (in which case the UI would not really have been improved in the first place).

---

His point wasn't that it can be done but it's not as easy. He said you couldn't do it. I was addressing that specific point. You can do it, in Spotlight, with the GUI.

[tallscot]

Hey, Popular Science says it's "The Best Of What's New 2005".
They just don't grasp that some users are having problems with it, I guess. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

[jmincey]

"You can do it, in Spotlight, with the GUI."
Okay, and my point is that merely being ABLE to do something is not good enough -- otherwise, Apple might as well just ship out Darwin and forget all the Quartz/Aqua stuff.

[griffman]

"His point wasn't that it can be done but it's not as easy. He said you couldn't do it. I was addressing that specific point. You can do it, in Spotlight, with the GUI."
To be technically correct, you're not actually searching with Spotlight. You're using Spotlight's interface, but performing a fallback search that relies on the same mechanism as did OS 10.3 and earlier. Since there is no index file, there's nothing for Spotlight to search.
You can see this in action if you run a search for 'cache' on just System and Library, and compare the time required to display the results with what you get when you search for the same term in a Spotlight-enabled folder. On my machine, it took just as long to find 82 results in those two folders as it did to find 854 items in my other folders!
So to do a Spotlight search on those folders, you need to use the hackery I linked to in an earlier post...
-rob.

[tallscot]

Okay, and my point is that merely being ABLE to do something is not good enough -- otherwise, Apple might as well just ship out Darwin and forget all the Quartz/Aqua stuff.
Yes, I agree. Apple should just give us Darwin and nothing else if they are going to make us click Other. You sometimes make arguments in the same fashion as my 5-year old (you never let me drink milk). /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif
Your point is you want it easy to use. Great. I agree. Things should be easy to use.

[tallscot]

To be technically correct, you're not actually searching with Spotlight. You're using Spotlight's interface
And you don't have to use the Terminal or go find them manually.