Every so often I need a little Mac 911 myself, and when I do, it’s great to be able to go to the source—Apple. I, along with some of my Macworld colleagues, had an opportunity to do just that for a debriefing on all that is Leopard.
During our session I was able to ask one of the questions that had been perplexing me during my short time with the Leopard GM.
Apple tells us that you can use Spotlight to search into the guts of the System and Library folders, but, for the life of me, I can’t make it work. What’s the secret?
The answer is that you have to tell the Mac to do it. To do so, follow these steps:
1. Produce a Searching window by typing Command-F while in the Finder.
2. Choose Other from the Kind pop-up menu.
3. In the sheet that appears, type System in the Search field.
4. Select the single System Files entry that appears.
5. Should you wish to conduct these deep searches in the future and want to make it easier to do (meaning you won’t have to choose Other and look for the System Files entry), enable the In Menu option. System Files will now appear in the pop-up.
6. Click OK.
7. When you next wish to search every part of your Mac, select System Files from the Kind pop-up menu and in the pop-up menu next to it, choose Include. Your results will include not just the kind of Spotlight results you saw with Tiger but now also the files the Mac OS tries to keep from prying eyes.