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12.08.05
Spotlight,
Mdfind (Mac OS X Tiger Searching)
 By
A.P. Lawrence
Most users will probably see Spotlight as an enhanced, very fast file searcher:
something that builds an index of files and their contents, and can very quickly
search that index and return results.
Actually, Spotlight is much, much more than that, but if that's all you need,
it sure beats "find" and "grep". That's true even if all we are talking about
is finding text.
I'm not a bit interested in the GUI interface to Spotlight. It's fine for what
it is, but the command line "mdfind" is much more interesting. But before we get
to that, let's look at where Spotlight stores its index:
$
sudo bash
# pwd
/.Spotlight-V100
# ls -l
total 183136
-rw------- 1 root admin 0 May 6 14:59 .journalHistoryLog
-rw------- 1 root admin 32591872 May 6 15:02 .store.db
-rw------- 1 root admin 28573696 May 6 14:55 ContentIndex.db
-rw------- 1 root admin 391 May 6 14:59 _exclusions.plist
-rw------- 1 root admin 378 May 1 20:34 _rules.plist
-rw------- 1 root admin 32591872 May 6 15:02 store.db
# cat _exclusions.plist
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"? >
< !DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"
>
< plist version="1.0 ">
< dict >
< key>EXCLUSIONS< /key >
< array >
< string >/Users/apl/snapshots< /string >
< string >/Users/apl/Movies< /string >
< string >/Users/apl/Music< /string >
< string >/Users/apl/Pictures< /string >
< /array >
< /dict >
< /plist >
#
Notice the EXCLUSIONS list? You can add to that with the System Preferences tool,
but this is where it is actually stored. However, as we'll see in a moment, this
is NOT all that Spotlight (and mdfind) ignores. You need to be aware of that when
using mdfind.
For the simplest use, just do "mdfind whatever". Can you use that in a script?
Why not?
for
i in `mdfind Stuff`
do
scp $i me@somewhere.com:$i
done
But mdfind is much more powerful than that:
mdfind
'kMDItemTextContent == "*Seneca*" && kMDItemFSName != "*emlx"'
mdfind 'kMDItemTextContent == "*Seneca*" && kMDItemContentType != "com.apple.mail.emlx"'
That's searching metadata. What metadata can you search? Well, anything that's
available and "mdls" will show you that:
$
mdls t.txt t.txt ------------- kMDItemAttributeChangeDate = 2005-05-06 15:44:32
-0400
kMDItemContentCreationDate = 2003-12-15 18:11:55 -0500
kMDItemContentModificationDate = 2005-05-06 15:44:31 -0400
kMDItemContentType = "public.plain-text"
kMDItemContentTypeTree = (
"public.plain-text",
"public.text",
"public.data",
"public.item",
"public.content"
)
kMDItemDisplayName = "t.txt"
kMDItemFSContentChangeDate = 2005-05-06 15:44:31 -0400
kMDItemFSCreationDate = 2003-12-15 18:11:55 -0500
kMDItemFSCreatorCode = 0
kMDItemFSFinderFlags = 0
kMDItemFSInvisible = 0
kMDItemFSLabel = 0
kMDItemFSName = "t.txt"
kMDItemFSNodeCount = 0
kMDItemFSOwnerGroupID = 20
kMDItemFSOwnerUserID = 501
kMDItemFSSize = 2552
kMDItemFSTypeCode = 0
kMDItemID = 1802523
kMDItemKind = "Plain text document"
kMDItemLastUsedDate = 2003-12-15 18:11:55 -0500
kMDItemUsedDates = (2003-12-15 18:11:55 -0500)
Read
the rest of the article.
About the Author:
A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com |
