The grep -ri command (recursively search for matches, ignoring case) in Terminal is incredibly useful, but incredibly slow. In OS X, we can leverage mdfind to quickly find the files containing our search string, then use grep to find the strings within only those files. Here's a script to do just that.
Leveraging mdfind to eliminate files that do not contain the matching string makes this operation an order of magnitude quicker, cutting it to mere seconds instead of minutes on over 100GB of data in my tests. The downside to this is that Spotlight does not index every directory, so you may be missing some files such as system files.
If you don't want to use this script, the same thing can be accomplished by hand by writing mdfind -0 -onlyin searchdir searchstring | xargs -0 grep -Hi searchstring. I've included the -H and -i options to more closely match the output of mdfind, but you can safely remove them.
#!/bin/bash # # Spotlight metadata find and grep by Daniel.Hoherd at gmail dot com ## Check for at least two arguments, print usage if else if [ $# -lt 1 ] ; then echo "usage: $0 searchstring [dir or file] [dir2 or file2]" exit ; fi ss=$1; shift; files=$@; until [ -z "$1" ] ; do thisitem=$1 onlyin="-onlyin '$thisitem' $onlyin" shift done; eval mdfind -0 $onlyin "$ss" | xargs -0 grep -Hi "$ss"
If you don't want to use this script, the same thing can be accomplished by hand by writing mdfind -0 -onlyin searchdir searchstring | xargs -0 grep -Hi searchstring. I've included the -H and -i options to more closely match the output of mdfind, but you can safely remove them.
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