Tech Reflect

Spotlight can be powerful and fast, but lacks some precise control over the results. Typically you get far more results than you would ever need. The command-line interface unlocks more advanced functionality and you can also integrate it into your scripts.

The core command is “mdfind” and you could do “man mdfind” to see all the possibilties. However, here are a series of examples.

Simple

# Find every file that contains parakeet in the contents.

mdfind parakeet

# Restrict the search to a folder and ites subfolders (NOTE: Must be full path)

mdfind parakeet -onlyin /Users/admin/Pictures

# Display current matches and provide a live update when the number of matches changes. Great for testing you command but also to see live updates of things like a log file being created by your script.

mdfind parakeet -onlyin /Users/admin/Pictures -live

# Just display the live updating count. Less verbose and if 

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You can do some really interesting and time saving things using curly braces on the bash command line. Essentially, curly braces with a list of things separated by commas means run this command once for each item in the list.

This is best illustrated by a number of examples.

Create a complex folder hierarchy

mkdir -p folder/{1, 2, 3}/{a, b, c}

This creates this folder hierarchy:

folder/
     1/
          a/
          b/
     2/
          a/
          b/
     3/
          a/
          b/

Rename files in a hierarchy

This renames foo/bar/baz/1 to foo/bar/baz/2

mv foo/bar/baz/{1,2} 

Rename variation

This renames /foo/bar/baz/1 to foo/bar/tweedle/2

mv foo/bar/{baz/1, tweedle/2} 

Shortcut for adding extensions

This renames file to file1.backup

mv file1{.,backup}

Add extensions with wildcard matching

This will find files containing the word “banana” and slap an extension on them. This is an interesting case in that {,.bak} means add an extension.

find . -name "banana*" -exec mv \{\}{,.bak} \; 

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