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Spotlight does this too
Authored by: tempel on Jan 06, '09 08:33:01AM

(FAF Developer here) I disagree.

FAF finds really _every_ item on a disk, while Spotlight may choose to ignore certain folders, including system files. Also, Spotlight certainly won't find items that are root-only accessible (although, I admit, there's hardly any cases where one will want to locate those).
As a low level software delevoper I've often had Spotlight fail on me, even with the options enabled you mentioned. That's why I wrote FAF - to be sure I won't miss anything - while Spotlight always leaves a doubt.

And I made it free so that one shouldn't have any reason not to use FAF :)



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Spotlight does this too
Authored by: müzso on Jan 06, '09 12:07:20PM

I'm not sure what you mean regarding "looking for content". If I get it right, you wrote that your tool is not much faster than "find" when looking for content too (it might be similiar or slower in speed than "find" ... this is not trivial from that sentence).

I don't understand how "find" and "looking for content" come together. "find" has no options that allow you to look for content. Of course you can use the "-exec" with eg. grep, but that's a completely different story (since in this case "find" would launch another tool/process to do the string search, which is of course not comparable to solutions where the file search tool opens the file itself and looks for the string). Imho a tool ,that does both the file search and the string search itself, must be faster than find+grep, when looking for content.

Another good question is: how can your tool be faster than "find" (when looking just for names) if your tool does not utilize an index (sort of database to speed up search)? And if it does, than how much can it be different from Spotlight?



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Spotlight does this too
Authored by: müzso on Jan 06, '09 12:10:51PM

Sorry. The prev. post was a reply to tempel's post on Tue, Jan 6 2009 at 8:28AM PST. I opened two reply screens and posted the prev. answer in the wrong textarea.



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Spotlight does this too
Authored by: müzso on Jan 06, '09 12:21:50PM

As for Spotlight's inability to find items that are only root-accessible: I suppose you meant that FAF can do that. That would be quite a thing.
File permissions are meant to restrict access regardless of what API or method you use to access the filesystem. If your app can circumwent file permissions, then the Mac OS X kernel got a pretty large whole.
If your app asks for proper credentials to find files with root-only access permissions, then it's no more clever than "find" (which can be run with su or sudo using root privileges). I don't know what user credentials does Spotlight's indexer run with (maybe not root ... since otherwise it would find any file, even the ones that are accessible only by root ... I don't use Spotlight), but I bet it can be modded to use "root".



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Spotlight does this too
Authored by: leamanc on Jan 07, '09 06:05:57AM

The hint states that it requires an admin password to sudo-to-root to find those system files, so there's not a big security hole in the kernel.

I haven't tried the app yet, but I think many of you guys are missing the point. This app doesn't do everything 'find' does, it doesn't do everything 'locate' does, and it doesn't do everything Spotlight does. But it does do some unique things in (apparently) a very fast fashion, by using inherent features of the HFS+ filesystem that Apple themselves do not exploit anymore. This is similar to the Find File feature of the classic Mac OS, which many of you will remember was amazingly fast, even on disks full of gigabytes of data.



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