Searching for files on your mac

Here are some nice little tips for people that are more familiar with the command line and prefer it's speed of use to hopeless GUIs. These little utilities can be really powerful when used in scripts.

This will list out all the stored meta data about a particular document

$ cd ~/Documents
$ mdls resume.docx

Or try searching all your PDF files:

$ mdfind -name "pdf" pickaxe
/Users/xx/Documents/books/eBooks/ruby pickaxe1.8.pdf
/Users/xx/Documents/books/eBooks/ruby pickaxe1.9.pdf

These utils even have some nice support for xargs. If you need to run some specific action on the all the files you've found, you can use it, thus:

$ mdfind -name "pdf" pickaxe -0 | xargs -0 file
/Users/xx/Documents/books/eBooks/ruby pickaxe1.8.pdf: PDF document, version 1.3
/Users/xx/Documents/books/eBooks/ruby pickaxe1.9.pdf: PDF document, version 1.3

Or even just open the files using the default application:

$ mdfind -name "pdf" pickaxe -0 | xargs -0 open

And you will see the files open in preview.

Combining this with utilities such as ImageMagick, provides a whole new world of converting images into different formats, copying files around, uploading to webservers using wget and so on. This is a very powerful feature!