[EmC]

Hi all. I have been using OS X for about a year and a half now. What i need to know how to do is to make a search eqivalent to "*.*"

If I wanted all the files in a folder listed in windows I would just go to start>search> search for "*.*", set the folder location that I want to look in. When the search is completed I would have a list of all the files in that folder and sub-folders. Any way to do this in OS X?

The reason I ask is because I am trying to grab all of my audio files from iTunes, but I can't get the numbers to add up. According to iTunes I have:

722 unprotected AAC files.
298 protected AAC files.
104 mp3 files.
----------------------------
1124 Files

When I search in the finder for m4a, m4b, mp3 and m4p I get:

506 m4a
12 m4b
104 mp3
286 m4p
-----------
908 Files

All of my purchased/protected music is accounted for. Where the hell is the rest of the music that I ripped off my cds?

[Kickaha]

Type a period in the search box.

Seriously.

How's your forehead? I hate those palm-shaped marks...

[EmC]

OK, I'll add that to my KB, but why are the searches maxing out at 502-507 entries? I chose local disks, typed in a period and got 502 results. Then I also chose "selection", opened the iTunes music folder and typed in a period and only got 507 results. Any suggestions?

[Brad]

Well, if you really want to get picky, you could use the "find" or "locate" command from the Terminal.

[Kickaha]

Originally Posted by EmC OK, I'll add that to my KB, but why are the searches maxing out at 502-507 entries? I chose local disks, typed in a period and got 502 results. Then I also chose "selection", opened the iTunes music folder and typed in a period and only got 507 results. Any suggestions?

Not sure... let me try something on this end...

Well whattaya know. 503 files... 505 files... Hunh.

Yeah, that'd be a bug in my opinion.

[Brad]

How odd.

In the Finder on my PB, I just hit apple-F and told it to search everywhere for filenames containing "." and it returned 10,688 results. I did the same on my tower and it successfully returned 14,044 results.

However, the status icon kept on spinning despite there being no more hard drive access or CPU usage. So, I repeated my search with the exact same settings.

On the PB it only returned 9,540 items and the tower 12,957. On top of that, after one of the searches, the Finder just broke. Navigating into certain folders turned up empty with the status icon spinning forever. Weird.

It sounds like there's a problem generally with Finder's searching function, a memory leak or ceiling or something related. Yikes!

[EmC]

I used pathfinder to do the search. It found all of my files. Overall it is pretty nice, just wish it didn't slow everything down when copying large amounts of files. Link

[bborofka]

Why not just Consolidate your Library and Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized? Then you know all your music is in ~/Music/iTunes and you never have to worry about where your music is stored.

[staph]

For the record, to do it from the command line, you can do this:

find /Volumes/Jones/ -iname *.m4a 2> /dev/null

Substitute the root volume you want to search for /Volumes/Jones/ (that's the volume I keep my music in), and "mp3", "m4p" etc for "m4a".

Alternatively, you could do this:

locate *.m4a

If you want to count them, you could do something a little trickier, like this little perl script:

#!/usr/bin/perlmy $findcounter;foreach (`find /Volumes/Jones/ -iname *.m4a 2> /dev/null`) { 	#or `locate *.m4a`        $findcounter++;        print $_;}print "Found $findcounter results.\n";

[EmC]

Originally Posted by bborofka Why not just Consolidate your Library and Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized? Then you know all your music is in ~/Music/iTunes and you never have to worry about where your music is stored.

That is how I have it. I needed to separate the music I ripped from my cds and the music I purchased. I got it done, thanks for the advice.