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I can enter "Shockwave Flash Movie" in the the search field of a Finder window and find all files that are of Kind, "Shockwave Flash Movie" However, I really want a list of all files that are NOT Shockwave Flash Movie. How can I do this?

2 Answers 2

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There are basically two ways:

One is, select Kind, Other and enter

-"Shockwave Flash Movie"

However, this will also filter out all other types whose names only contain with "Shockwave Flash Movie". The chance is low, fortunately.


The other way is performing a raw spotlight query by selecting the entry Raw Query from the first menu.

Then you can enter the following:

kMDItemContentType != "public.jpeg"

This finds all files except JPEG images. "public.jpeg" of course is the file type you want to exclude.

To find out the internal name of SWF files, open a Terminal.app window, type mdls (with trailing Space) and drag&drop an .SWF file into this terminal window. Press Enter. Now look for a line starting with kMDItemContentType, this is the name of the SWF file type you must enter into the search query. (You only have to do this part once.)

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  • Interesting, -"Shockwave Flash Movie" doesn't work for me, but you other way is working. Plus, I feel it is more powerful. Thank you. Oct 28, 2010 at 2:18
  • @Michael: It depends on what the file type is called on your system. Open a directory in list view and look in the "Kind" column. This is what you need to enter.
    – Daniel Beck
    Oct 28, 2010 at 5:06
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I've tried: -"Plain text" and I got tons of file except those of the Plain text kind
Hope this helps

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