years of unix I spent without knowing about the
locate
“fool me once, shame on you” or however GWB would say that.
Now with spotlight in OS X 10.4 this became somewhat redundant.
It was only today that I realized:
mdfind
is your command line friend. With a command like
mdfind "kMDItemFSName == a.out"
you can easily replicate what
locate a.out
would have done. This works nicely around certain things I don’t like about the spotlight UI: sometimes I only want to see where a given file name might be hiding. Spotlight finds it, of course. However I did not find an easy and intuitve way to only find file names. The UI finds usually to much. And there seems not to be an easy way to get the directory in a copy paste buffer. Command line wins again.
Yeah! for mdutil mdls mdfind and all the others!