Folders having numeric names don't appear on search results

Question

I have been facing a problem with searching for folders having solely numeric characters for their names. They have stopped appearing in the results. I am using macOS Catalina. At first, I thought that a mere restart would fix it, but it did not.

As a simple test, I created a folder named 12345678 inside my Downloads directory. Then I click on search and entered the folder name 12345678. The result was empty for both scopes (This Mac and Downloads folder)

Other folders having alphabetic names/alpha-numeric names appear correctly on the search results.

Does anyone know what the problem could be? Any advice would be very helpful.

PS: I'm not sure if this is related, but, many of my tags have also stopped working. Again to test this, I created a folder and added a Red tag. Then I got to Red tags in Finder, but the folder isn't there.

Answer 1

I think you have to surround the numeric name with quotes in search window. Ex: "12345678".

Answer 2

It turns out that the problem is somehow related to available storage.

I have a 240 GB SSD and when my free space becomes less than 20GB, the search problem arises. I cleared some old files to gain an additional free space of 1 GB and voila, the search started to work as before. I made multiple copies of some files to bring down the free space and the search problem appeared again.

Here are a few more side effects I noticed when the available storage went less than 20 GB:

1. The content of any external drives (HDD and Flash drives) would not show up.
2. Restart stopped working (I tried this 5 to 6 times and every time it froze at the Apple logo for several minutes). Shutting down and Turning it on worked alright.

Thank you everyone for your tips.