Similarly, I could find all the non-PDF files containing this search term On the command line, I could get all the LyX files containing the word Bratwurst by typing The Terminal lets you get the most out of Spotlight because it makes "post-processing" easier.Īlthough the advanced options of the GUI search box also let me do things like kind: lyx (because I have installed a Spotlight importer for LyX), this doesn't work for arbitrary file types. The main Spotlight terminal command is mdfind. To go further, the Terminal is more useful. For example, ending a search phrase with kind: pdf will throw out all non-pdf items. Spotlight allows you to customize your searches to a certain extent from within the Spotlight search box. This is an advantage that far outweighs its drawbacks, because it shows Apple is really trying to take the needs of the UNIX-level user seriously. So it's no wonder that Spotlight's functionality turns out to be accessible from the Darwin command line as well.
But as will be discussed below, this is nothing completely new to UNIX (see the locate command, but also the various help systems such as apropos).
It's all about collecting metadata in a central store. The Spotlight tips page mentioned above provides more insight into Spotlight's inner workings.
GREP MAC SYSTEM FOR FILES MAC OS X
Several years into the life of Spotlight, the iteration found in Mac OS X Snow Leopard is meanwhile quite mature and can be customized from within the Finder, as the screen shot shows. I'll collect some of my own bits of information below. This is discussed on Apple's Spotlight tips page.
GREP MAC SYSTEM FOR FILES HOW TO
It is important, therefore, to know how to restrict such searches. The list of retrieved files in a Spotlight search is often too exhaustive to be directly usable. It seems the main problem with Spotlight is that making everything searchable doesn't imply that everything will be findable. However, what about people who either don't have Tiger or (a common phenomenon) don't like Spotlight? The answer is: searching has always been one of the strong points of UNIX, so there is a lot of search functionality already there, hidden in the depths of the Darwin system. There is no Google desktop search for the Mac, but if you have OS X 10.4 (Tiger), then there is Spotlight. This page deals with the perennial problem of finding things on your computer, and in particular on a Mac running OS X.
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