The Unix mdfind utility lets you search files using the Spotlight index from the Terminal. This is a great tool, but it doesn't quite replace find, which makes it very easy to search the current directory.
So here's a shell alias for a new spot command line tool which performs a Spotlight search only within the current directory:
alias spot='mdfind -onlyin `pwd`'
Example:
/Users/alf/Documents# spot run
/Users/alf/Documents/iStumbler/Bug Reports/istumbler-runaway-20050731.txt
/Users/alf/Documents...etc.
Add the alias to your .profile (or .bash_profile) file to automatically add it to every new shell.
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