I'm on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). What's the best way to find a folder for which I'm not sure of the full name?

For example, I know the folder name I want is like:

• "farm-animal-type"

But the full name may be something like:

• "farm-animal-type-horse"

On Windows, I would just use the find tool through Windows Explorer.

0

7 Answers

If you take interest in the command line:

find / -type d -name "*farm-animal-type*"

you can change the starting area from / to whatever you want if you have a good idea of where the folder is generally located. Spotlight will be much snappier as the folders are indexed though.

2

Using terminal, you can do:

mdfind kind:folder "farm-animal-type"

4

Spotlight

In the top right of any finder window there is a text-based input for searching.

OR, the magnifying glass in the menubar on the top right of the screen.

2

On Mac OS 10.10.5 (Yosemite), in Finder, click on the "+" button at the top right, just below the search string. Set "Type" = "Folder" and you're set!

As suggested by @John T and @macek above, Use Spotlight. It's much faster than using the wildcard in the terminal with find or locate commands if your folder name is having common file/application tags, such as searching for a folder with tags Python or Java. In your current case, it should work fine with any approach, but it's noteworthy and should be kept in mind.

2

In the finder:

Command + F

Sends you to the right top search box. There, type:

kind:folder and then, after a space, the word (or letters in a sequence) that you want to appear in the folder's name.

For example, if I want to find a folder that I remember it contained the word "personal":

kind:folder personal 

it retrieves for me the following folders:

"1_PERSONAL", "1.1. Personal Statements", "personaldata", "Personalization".

In Finder, enter the folder name into the search window on the top right. Click the small + icon appearing below the search window to add a new search criteria. All the way to the left on the new search criteria item, select "Kind" from the left dropdown and "Folder" from the right dropdown

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