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mdfind.md

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Basic Search

$ mdfind invoice
  • narrow down the search by adding terms.
$ mdfind "invoice apress"

Boolean Operators

  • All words passed in a query string to mdfind are implicitly AND together
    • That is, "invoice apress" means both words must appear
  • Spotlight allows other Boolean operators as well:
|, the pipe character, means Boolean OR
- means to exclude a term
() create groups

  • Working with these operators can be tricky.

  • Whitespace is significant when building queries.

  • case1: To get all documents with "invoice" or "o'reilly"

    • with no space between the terms
$ mdfind "invoice|o'reilly"
  • case2: find all documents with "invoice" but not "apress",
    • with no intervening spaces, and parentheses around the term I want to exclude.
$ mdfind "invoice(-apress)"
  • case3: get a list of invoices or contracts from O'Reilly,
$ mdfind "(invoice|contract) o'reilly"
  • Note that in all these examples that have more than a single word, I'm using double quotes around the search term.
    • This makes the Unix shell pass our multiple words as a single parameter.
    • Otherwise, mdfind uses only the last word, so that
$ mdfind invoice contract
is the same as
$ mdfind contract
  • It( double quotes ) also prevents the shell from intercepting characters that it would use as special, like the parentheses, and passes them unmolested to mdfind.
  • This is especially important if I try to search for "O'Reilly". Without quotes, I will stuck in shell ...
$ mdfind O'Reilly
>

Narrowing Search Results

  • -onlyin option
$ mdfind -onlyin ~/Downloads invoice
  • can have multiple -onlyin options
$ mdfind -onlyin ~/writing -onlyin "/Users/alester/to be filed" invoice
  • Note that because of the spaces in /Users/alester/to be filed I must put the pathname in double quotes.
  • This also means I can't use the tilde shortcut ~ , because the tilde is a shell character that won't be expanded in quotes.

Filtering mdfind's output

  • grep
  • now mdfind gave you a list of searched file name. you can use grep to filter the file name by some pattern
| grep xxx 
| grep -i xxx    // case-insensitive
| grep -v xxx     // not include xxx

Listing Metadata with mdls

  • The mdls command is the partner to mdfind
  • mdls lists the metadata attributes associated with a given file.
$ mdls ./InGameStateMachine.h
kMDItemContentCreationDate         = 2017-12-20 04:57:57 +0000
kMDItemContentCreationDate_Ranking = 2017-12-20 00:00:00 +0000
...
  • If I'm only interested in certain attributes, I can use the -name option:
$ mdls -name kMDItemFSSize ./InGameStateMachine.h  
kMDItemFSSize = 15076
  • Now I know some attributes name. I want to find files with kMDItemFSOwnerGroupID == 20
$ mdfind -onlyin . 'kMDItemFSOwnerGroupID = 20'
  • another example:
    • I know that I have more than three songs written by Roger Waters, so I'll rerun the search with wildcards, with an asterisk to mean "any string."
$ mdfind 'kMDItemComposer = "*Waters*"'
  • If I want a case-insensitive search, I can put the letter c outside the double quotes, as in this search to find all forms of "McCartney", regardless of the capitalization.
$ mdfind 'kMDItemComposer = "*mccartney*"c'
  • Maybe I want to find all my music files that were sampled at a bit rate lower than 128K:
$ mdfind 'kMDItemAudioBitRate < 128000'