With Finder
as the active application, choose Find
from the File
menu. In the Searching "This Mac"
window that brings up, select Kind
is Document
, then use +
to add another condition with Name
as the first item. If you choose begins with
as the second item, you can find files whose names begin with a particular character, like space. The ends with
condition won't find files with the names in your examples unless the filename suffix ends with the character of interest, but you can find a particular character, like a space, as the last character before the suffix if you choose contains
and follow that character with .
. For your file..jpg
example you would use ..
for the search text. This approach will find literal *
characters in filenames, if you choose contains
and use *
for the search text.
Finding such files with the find
command (in Terminal
) is straightforward if you quote special characters appropriately. For example,
find Downloads -name ' *' -ls
reports all files in my Downloads directory which begin with a space,
find Downloads -name '*\**' -ls
reports all files in my Downloads directory with a *
in its name,
find Downloads -name '*\.\.*' -ls
reports all files in my Downloads directory with two consecutive .
characters in its name, and
find Downloads -name '* .*' -ls
reports all files with a space character immediately before the suffix. Finally,
find Downloads -name ' *' -ls -o -name '*\**' -ls -o -name '*\.\.*' -ls -o -name '* .*' -ls
reports all of those files in my Downloads directory. You can anchor the search elsewhere by replacing Downloads
on the command line, and you can use other options to restrict the search further (-type f
would ignore directories and symlinks).