Mac OSX Tips & Tricks #8: Finding Files via Terminal

This is how you recursively search all notes.txt files in your home directory (~) for the text snippet foo (from an OSX terminal):

mdfind -name notes.txt -onlyin ~ -0 | xargs -0 grep -i "foo"

It has at least 3 advantages over the traditional find/grep combo:

• mdfind is the terminal version of Spotlight: It is blazingly fast because it uses an index
• mdfind does not lead to “Permission denied” noise
• The -0 flag works around spaces in file/folder names

Happy searching!