I have two files in Download folder: Profile.pdf and Profile-2.pdf. If I search for "Profile.pdf" the search works fine. But when I search for "Profile*.pdf" or "Pro*.pdf" it doesn't find nothing. How to solve this?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
Original Title: Search using wildcard characters
MacBook Air 15″, macOS 15.6
I assume that you are talking about Finder search.
AFAICT, you don't have wildcards like * but Finder search is exquisitely customizable, you can use any number of file characteristics and even do Boolean operations (AND, OR, NOT) on them.
These features are sadly not well known by many, and thus grossly underused.
For example:
Furthermore, you can Save any search as a Smart Folder, so you can reuse it any time; the results of the search are automatically updated as your content changes.
Now you could save the above change and name it perhaps "Profile*.pdf", and even add it to your Sidebar.
You didn't clarify what agent you were using to "search" for your documents. There are no wildcard searches supported by Finder, as none are supported by Spotlight, upon which the Finder depends for searching. The Terminal application does support wildcard searches owing to the Shell and UNIX operating system.
Luis Sequeira1 has covered the Finder's Find (⌘F) interface as one approach.
When using the Finder Window search field, or the Spotlight menu bar 🔍 tool, one can incorporate a case-insensitive search with a partial name to match a file pattern in a given folder:
(kind:folder name:downloads) OR (kind:pdf name:profile)
Apple has some documentation on using Spotlight searches: Narrow your search results on Mac - Apple Support
If done in a Finder Window, that will display a resulting window with several Downloads folders and also the PDF files found in the folder matching your partial name parameter. When you have the Finder View menu > Show Path Bar enabled, clicking on a resulting file will show the path to it at the bottom of the window.
In the search criteria, you can use, begins with, ends with, and contains or matches to search similarly to what you’re asking with wild cards.
The difference between contains and matches has to do with finding the whole text delimited by word boundaries. When you type into the search field and choose the “name contains” search token, it is actually using “matches,” not “contains.”
Put in Profile, type a space, and then PDF.
(261201)
How do I enable wildcard search for files on macOS?
