To:Mail.app From:MacHackShack.com Subject:Advanced keyword searching with Mail.app and spotlight

Thanks to @rands on twitter, I now realize you can use the gmail-style keyword text search queries in mail (Command-Option-F). This technique also works in spotlight.

Try:

to:someone from:someone subject:something

The "someone" part seems to work with full names or email addresses.

The only confusing thing is the mail search bar should switch to "Entire message" when you're using a keyword-style search rather than the "From", "To" or "Subject" buttons.

It's a very limited syntax and not well publicized but welcome anyway cause what's there works. These tests done in Snow Leopard 10.6.2 and Mail.app 4.2.

How to restart a hung Finder in Mac OS/X without rebooting

Warning this is HIGHLY UNAUTHORIZED. Proceed at your own risk.

So: save everything first before going on.

Okay - to do this, it's pretty basic. We're actually not sending it the kill signal, instead telling it to restart itself or in unix signal parlance: SIGHUP. I learnt this doing some BSD coding on HP/UX systems years ago.

So first, we need the Finder's pid. This will get it:

ps -e | grep Finder | grep -v grep | cut -c1-6

And then pass that to the kill command with -sighup switch:

kill -sighup `ps -e | grep Finder.app | grep -v grep | cut -c1-6`

This will clobber Finder and it will reopen fresh(ish) as a daisy.

Put it in a script for reuse call this restartfinder.sh

#!/bin/bash

kill -sighup `ps -e | grep Finder.app | grep -v grep | cut -c1-6`

chmod +x restartfinder.sh

And you're done.