Finder - Searching in it, adding columns, checking path

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Good morning everybody,

When I started my MacBook this morning, I got a bunch of Yahoo notifications.
1. How and where do I change the setup to stop these notifications?


I opened Finder and searched for Notifications. I got a long list of files, apparently from in MacBook. Almost every file has a duplicate.

2. How do I locate which folder or sub-folder the files are in (path)?

3. Is it possible to add columns to this search screen, and if so how?

4. Is there a quick way of deleting the duplicates, or do I have to select and them one by one and then delete?


5. In the Sidebar, I see under Devices:
Mukunds MacBook Pro
zxcv
Remote Disk

6. What is this ZXCV, and where did it come from?

7. Please could you help me understand the difference between Mukunds MacBook Pro, and Documents (under Favourites).

8. All the listed files appear to be in Mukunds MacBook Pro. But how can I access them?


Many thanks for your help

Have a safe day,

Mukund
 
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Good morning everybody,

When I started my MacBook this morning, I got a bunch of Yahoo notifications....

Open your Web browser and see if the default search engine that you set has been changed to Yahoo. If it has been changed to Yahoo see if you can change it back to your previous choice. If it can't be changed, you've been hit by a new bit of adware.

"CrossRider"
New Crossrider variant installs configuration profiles on Macs - Malwarebytes Labs | Malwarebytes Labs
 
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Thanks Randy,
I apologise for the slight error in describing the issue of :
" I got a bunch of Yahoo notifications.
1. How and where do I change the setup to stop these notifications?"

Just realised that these are not notifications from the Browser, but from my YAHOO MAIL.
I will go and check out the notification setting in my Yahoo mail, and see if I can fix it.

Would you be able to suggest any replies to my other issues, please?
 
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Would you be able to suggest any replies to my other issues, please?

When you do a search for things on your Mac, you have to realize that there are multiple accounts on your computer. At it's heart, the Mac OS is a multi-user OS. That means that you will normally have duplicates of certain folder structures and certain types of support files for every account on your Mac. For instance, at minimum you will have two Applications folders, two Documents folders, two Extension folders, etc. (One for the administrator account, and one for every user account set up on your Mac.) It would be a mistake to delete these duplicates.

When you do a Spotlight search and locate a file or folder, in older versions of the Mac OS you could find the path to that file by hovering your cursor over the file/folder listing in Spotlight for a few seconds. In more recent versions of the Mac OS, highlight the file/folder and then hold down the Command key, and the path will appear at the bottom right of the Spotlight window.
 
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2. take note of a filename - search for it with Spotlight - it's likely many of the files will be in the same folder, & Spotlight identifies the location (if the first one you try doesn't turn up, try another, and another...)
 
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Thanks Randy and toMACsh for your responses. Noted.
A screen grab of my Finder results are attached.

Finder result with duplicates.png
 
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Hi Ian

I have posted this query in another post.

Would you be able to assist me.
There are two replies so far but they don't include all the answers.




SUBJECT: Finder - Searching in it, adding columns, checking path
Good morning everybody,

When I started my MacBook this morning, I got a bunch of Yahoo notifications.
1. How and where do I change the setup to stop these notifications?


I opened Finder and searched for Notifications. I got a long list of files, apparently from in MacBook. Almost every file has a duplicate.

2. How do I locate which folder or sub-folder the files are in (path)?

3. Is it possible to add columns to this search screen, and if so how?

4. Is there a quick way of deleting the duplicates, or do I have to select and them one by one and then delete?


5. In the Sidebar, I see under Devices:
Mukunds MacBook Pro
zxcv
Remote Disk

6. What is this ZXCV, and where did it come from?

7. Please could you help me understand the difference between Mukunds MacBook Pro, and Documents (under Favourites).

8. All the listed files appear to be in Mukunds MacBook Pro. But how can I access them?


Many thanks for your help

Have a safe day,

Mukund
 
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Notifications are managed in System Preferences > Notifications.
 
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@mukund, a bit of a tutorial on the macOS drive structure. It may help you understand what Finder is doing and showing.

Using your image:

You have named your Mac "Mukund's Macbook Pro." That is showing in the sidebar under Devices. You also seem to have an external drive named "zxcv" which may be an external drive, or an external SD card or memory stick, but it is mounted as a drive that is not natively internal to the machine. It might also be a .dmg file that is mounted as a drive. Without being there to look at it directly, it's hard to tell.

Your home directory is named "lele" and is shown under Favorites with a little house icon. "lele" is your login account.

The way macOS structures the drive is that at the root of the drive there are normally just a few folders. In my case there are these four: Applications, Library, System, and Users. Those are folders for ALL users, so if you install an application for all users, for example, it goes in this root application folder. In Users there are subfolders for each user you have created on the system, plus usually one user named "Shared" that the system creates. So, using your screenshot, if you go to "/Users" folder you should see at least "lele" and "Shared" as users, plus any other users you have created. If you open "lele" you should see all your files, including some you may not have known existed. There should be an Applications, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Movies, Music, Pictures, Public and maybe Library if you have set Library to be unhidden. Normally the Library for users is a hidden file to keep rookies from mucking in it and ruining their system. There may be other folders if you have created them, or maybe some that are created by applications you have installed/run. The Applications folder inside your user folder is for applications you installed only for yourself, not for everyone. Some applications install only for the user who installed it as default, as a security or piracy protection. On my system, for example, I have a game installed in my home folder Applications that is there probably because the developer licenses it by user, not by system. You have full read/write/delete access to the files in your own user folder, but no authority in any other user home folder as part of the security system of macOS. You can see that at work if you open the /Users folder and then look in any other user folder and see the "Do Not Enter" symbol on the folders of that other user. As was said earlier, macOS is inherently a multi-user system, so it protects each user from the others.

So, with that background, Finder searches the drive and may well find multiple copies of any given document depending on where and how you have saved your documents. Your image seems to show a lot of documents that you either received by email or that you downloaded through a browser. I'm speculating about that, based on the names of some of the documents. So what happens is that when you get an email with an attachment, for example, Mail stores that attachment in a folder in your Library. When you then detach that document and put it in your own home directory, you now have two copies of the document: one in the Mail database and one in your home directory. So a search of your entire drive will locate two copies of the document, as you can see. Similarly, when you download a document through a browser it goes to your Downloads folder by default, and if you copy from there to your home directory you have two copies, one in Downloads and one in your home folder. You can delete the copies in Downloads and then empty the trash to get rid of that duplication. Mail gets a bit tricker as you should not mess with the Mail databases directly. You can delete the message that holds the attachment, then empty the Mail trash and that should get rid of the copy in the Mail database.

Note that if you have a Time Machine or other backup drive attached and Finder does a search there, it will again find all those backups and report them as well.

Some shortcuts and conventions for you: the root of the internal boot drive is denoted by the symbol "/" and your home folder by "~". So the two Library folder are, for example "/Library" for the all-user system Library and "~/Library" for your specific user Library. The full path name to your user Library is "/Users/lele/Library" so using "~/Library" is a lot less to type.

Hope all that helps some with understanding what you are seeing.

You also asked, "Is it possible to add columns to this search screen, and if so how?" To add columns to Finder, right click on the top bar of display where the column headers are located. A window will open with the columns that are available. Put a check by what you want to see.
 
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If you're looking for help within Finder, see this: Get to know the Finder on your Mac - Apple Support.

I have set my Finder up specifically to suit my needs by;

Placing my Home folder and my users Library folder in the sidebar.
Under View, I have Show Path Bar and Show Status Bar enabled.

And in Finder Preferences, I do not display any items in my Desktop Folder (Desktop). You can also change the search setting under "Advanced".
 

IWT


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Brilliant tutorial, Jake.

Ian
 
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Jake, Bob and Ian,

You guys are amazing.
SO patient, polite and helpful.
Thanks a million
Jake, you have given me a lot to read, understand and absorb, and I shall try and do that tomorrow morning.
Bon nuit
 
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When you do a search for things on your Mac, you have to realize that there are multiple accounts on your computer. At it's heart, the Mac OS is a multi-user OS. That means that you will normally have duplicates of certain folder structures and certain types of support files for every account on your Mac. For instance, at minimum you will have two Applications folders, two Documents folders, two Extension folders, etc. (One for the administrator account, and one for every user account set up on your Mac.) It would be a mistake to delete these duplicates.

When you do a Spotlight search and locate a file or folder, in older versions of the Mac OS you could find the path to that file by hovering your cursor over the file/folder listing in Spotlight for a few seconds. In more recent versions of the Mac OS, highlight the file/folder and then hold down the Command key, and the path will appear at the bottom right of the Spotlight window.

Hi Randy,
Thanks
1. The Notification issue is cleared. Apple>System Preferences> Notifications ALL OFF :)

2. To the best of my knowledge, I have not set up any other USER. I a the only one who uses this machine and I therefore presume I am the Admin.
How can one check that?
In which case there shouldn't be the duplicates as explained by you, right?

3. Regarding the PATH. Yup, I did what you said and now I can see the path of each file.

Many thanks.


Will slowly get all my difficulties sorted on this forum and I am very grateful for everyone being so helpful
:D
 
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Reply to Jake

You have named your Mac "Mukund's Macbook Pro." That is showing in the sidebar under Devices. You also seem to have an external drive named "zxcv" which may be an external drive, or an external SD card or memory stick, but it is mounted as a drive that is not natively internal to the machine. It might also be a .dmg file that is mounted as a drive. Without being there to look at it directly, it's hard to tell.

I have no idea where this external drive has appeared from. It is not an external card or stick.
If I had set up a drive I wouldn’t name it so weird!

OK, here’s the deal. Finder shows two folders in Mukunds MBP:
First is Name:Network Kind: Neighborhood
Second is Name: zxcv Size101.37GB Kind: Startup Volume

In zxcv are the 4 folders just like you mention.
In my Applications folder there are a whole bunch of Docs that I had copied from my IBM machine Documents folder. They obviously got into this folder when I copied them to this machine. Instead they ought to have been saved in /User/ lele/Docs.

As suggested by you, I did a Spotlight search for “BMK Ticket.docx”
I found three copies!! In the paths indicated below:
Ex-Home Desktop computer>Travel>Airlines>Air Canada>BML Ticket
zxcv>Applications>Travel>Airlines>Air Canada>BML Ticket
zxcv>Applications>Travel>Airlines2>Air Canada>BML Ticket

Phew !!
Firstly, it’s gonna be a mammoth task to sort out all this duplicate crap.
Secondly, having deleted all the duplicates and some triplicates, I need to pull all those Docs OUT of the Applications folder and have them in my User Docs folder.

Please could you suggest how best I can go about it?

This title "Mukund's Macbook Pro." Frankly I’m not sure where this came from either.
How can I shorten it, and where?

Your home directory is named "lele" and is shown under Favorites with a little house icon. "lele" is your login account.
Actually “lele” is my pwd to open the MBP.
Can the Home directory be renamed easily. Don’t have to do it, just asking.

As I am the only User, will all the Docs that I create get saved in the Root Docs folder, or the lele folder, or both?

Will discuss the other points separately if you don't mind.

Thanks a ton
 
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Thanks, Bob
I will read up on the link.
:)
 
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Ok, you have a real mess on your hands. I suspect when you created your account that you put things in the wrong boxes, or responded incorrectly to some of the prompts. The fact that you put your password as the account name, for example, sort of implies that you put something in the wrong box. macOS never displays the password, so having it as your user name is NOT a good idea.

Based on what you have said, I think we need to take a look at what is going on. Do NOT delete any files yet, as all of those duplicates may or may not actually BE duplicates, but just multiple pointers to one file and if you delete the wrong one, you lose the entire file.

So, can you go to the ~/Applications/Utilities folder and run Disk Utility? When the window opens in the upper left corner is an icon labeled "View." Click on the little down arrow beside that box and select "Show All Devices" and then get a screen shot of what the window shows, including the sidebar. That will tell us the structure of your drives and from there we may be able to sort out what has been done.
 
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Second is Name: zxcv Size101.37GB Kind: Startup Volume
This has me concerned. If that's your startup drive it is a very small, 128GB maybe? You may want to start over by erasing the drive from the recovery partition. But if the internal drive is larger than 128GB, you will need to use an external drive to erase the internal drive.
 
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Bob, that is why I asked for the screenshot of Disk Utility. His system seems to be mucked up. We need to see what the structures are before he starts doing anything to "fix" it.
 
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2. To the best of my knowledge, I have not set up any other USER. I a the only one who uses this machine and I therefore presume I am the Admin.
How can one check that?
In which case there shouldn't be the duplicates as explained by you, right?

No, you will almost certainly have at least two users.

Things vary a bit based on which version of the Mac OS you are running, but my experience is that there are always at least two accounts on your Mac by default, even if you are the only user. For instance, the iMac in front of me running Mojave has an admin account with my name on it, and a generic Guest account. You might also see a Shared account (an account that lets different users share things).

You can check by going into:

Apple menu --> System Preferences --> Users and Groups

and looking in the left column to see what users there are.

In older versions of the Mac OS, Users and Groups is called Accounts.

See:
YouTube
 

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