Searching in osx for "anything but.."

Question

I was trying to clean up my music folders and I want to remove everything except MP3 files.

I want to know how to search for everything but MP3s and obviously the subfolders themselves.

What do I have to type into the searchlight box to achieve that?

Answer 1

Enter anything into the Finder's search field, and clear it again. You'll then be in the search interface that has a new bar near the top, with no active search criteria:

Click the + button at the right side of the new search context bar.

Hold Option and click the … button to the right of the new entry (it's another + button while you don't hold Option).

Now it should look like this:

Remove the first additional row (the one that showed the … button) by clicking its – button.

Then, configure the two recently added rows to say:

• None of the following are true
  • Kind is Music MP3

Here, I'll still need to change All to MP3, but otherwise, I'm done:

Answer 2

Assuming you want to delete non-mp3 files anywhere under a specific directory (which I assume is the current directory), and that they are all called names ending in .mp3, the following should work.

find . -type f \! -name \*.mp3 -exec rm {} \;

A simpler way, pointed out in a comment below (thanks, @DanielBeck!), would be to use the -delete option instead.

find . -type f \! -name \*.mp3 -delete

This finds all ordinary files (-type f) whose name does not (\!) match the pattern *.mp3, then deletes them (-exec rm {} \;, or the rather simpler -delete option).