How can I find all files that are not of a certain kind using Spotlight?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.

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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.)

Answer 2

I've tried: -"Plain text" and I got tons of file except those of the Plain text kind
Hope this helps