Tiger's Smarter Folders

A directory (Folder in Mac-speak) has no particular connection with the type of data you intend to store in it, but you can tag it with anything you like using Spotlight comments. If you choose "Get Info" for a Tiger folder, you'll see that you can add Spotlight searchable comments to the folder. This could be useful (assuming that you use Spotlight at all). For command line searching, you'd use "mdfind" and if you want to be specific about searching comments, use "kMDItemFinderComment":

 $ mdfind 'kMDItemFinderComment == "script application wrapper"'
 /Users/apl/Desktop/platypus Folder
 
 

Of course you can add Spotlight comments to any file also, but I think the folder tagging opens up more interesting possibilities. Using mdfind and some scripting, you could control misfiling: if a document doesn't match the comments property of its folder, it may not belong there. Combine that with monitoring directory changes and you can get quite a bit of automatic error checking for file storage.

Spotlight also has the ability to create "Smart Folders". If you click "Save" after doing a Spotlight search, you'll be creating a plist file which by default will be created in ~/Library/Saved Searches. It has a "savedSearch" extension, and contains the necessary information about your search:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
 <plist version="1.0">
 
 <dict>
         <key>CompatibleVersion</key>
         <integer>0</integer>
         <key>RawQuery</key>
         <string>(* = "fogpr1*"wcd || kMDItemTextContent = "fogpr1*"cd) && (kMDItemContentType != com.apple.mail.emlx) && (kMDItemContentType != public.vcard)</string>
 
         <key>SearchCriteria</key>
         <dict>
                 <key>AnyAttributeContains</key>
                 <string>fogpr1</string>
                 <key>CurrentFolderPath</key>
                 <array>
                         <string>/Users/apl</string>
 
                 </array>
                 <key>FXCriteriaSlices</key>
                 <array>
                         <dict>
                                 <key>FXSliceKind</key>
                                 <string>Skin</string>
                                 <key>Value</key>
 
                                 <string>KI**</string>
                         </dict>
                         <dict>
                                 <key>FXSliceKind</key>
                                 <string>Slsv</string>
                                 <key>Value</key>
                                 <string>DA**</string>
 
                         </dict>
                 </array>
                 <key>FXScope</key>
                 <integer>1396926573</integer>
                 <key>FXScopeArrayOfPaths</key>
                 <array>
                         <string>kMDQueryScopeHome</string>
 
                 </array>
         </dict>
         <key>Version</key>
         <string>10.4</string>
         <key>ViewOptions</key>
         <dict/>
 </dict>
 </plist>
 
 

This is a "live" folder. If you have it open in Finder, and are creating files in Terminal or anywhere else that will match the criteria, those files will instantly appear in your view.

Note that the conditional string is much more complex than anything you can type in Spotlight itself. You can use boolean logic with the command line "mdfind", and have more control with the View Options of a Spotlight search (especially be selecting "Raw Query"), but you could also manually edit this plist to get exactly what you want.

For example, if you have customers or clients, you could set up a smart folder for each customer and thus automatically track any reference to a particular customer in any document, no matter where you created it.

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