Its methodology does not rely on indexing, as does Spotlight's.
If you want an alternative to Spotlight, have a look at EasyFind. There are importers available for many file types now check the page There are some files that aren't searched by Spotlight, but that should be. Then if a difficult search needs to be performed, it could be done remotely on the backup server. The small computers could pretty much disable Spotlight for those directories that are backed up. In principle, one could use the command-line Spotlight tools to relieve small machines of the Spotlight activity alltogether by backing such machines up onto a large computer where Spotlight then indexes everything. Nevertheless, I'll go into some possible non-Spotlight approaches in what follows. In order to achieve the same thing with regular UNIX command tools, one has to think harder and wait longer. To discover them, just type mdfind without arguments. The man page for mdfind gives more information. If all your programs are in the directory "prgs", you can now type mdfind -onlyin progs accelerate, and your problem is solved in the blink of an eye.
#MAC OSX EASYFIND MAC#
But you're at home at your little Panther laptop away from the big number-crunching Mac at work where the programs are (OK, I don't have a Panther laptop anymore - it's just an example). You don't recall the name of the program, but would like to find it so you can see how you did the linking. Here is something you can do with Spotlight that you can't do so easily with the old Finder (Sherlock): Let's say you remember you once wrote a C program that had to be linked with the accelerate framework. 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.
#MAC OSX EASYFIND PDF#
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.
#MAC OSX EASYFIND 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.
#MAC OSX EASYFIND 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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