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Find 'non-findable' files
Authored by: jdsmith on Feb 19, '09 11:07:47AM
This and related tools I believe rely on the FSCatalogSearch, a feature of the HFS filesystem. I've been using a command line tool which calls this from John Chang, called findfile, available at this blog post, which is very informative and compares the results for several filename search methodologies. I believe he has more recently made a GUI tool of the same name.

I use findfile along with mdfind from the command line. Example:

% findfile fseventsd
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/CarbonCore.framework/Versions/A/Support/fseventsd
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.fseventsd.plist
/.fseventsd

and the equivalent mdfind usage:

% mdfind "kMDItemFSName == '*fseventsd*'"
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.fseventsd.plist
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/CarbonCore.framework/Versions/A/Support/fseventsd

Note that when called this way, mdfind (Spotlight's CLI equivalent) is faster than Spotlight since it doesn't match content or any other metadata, and about the same speed as findfile. Still findfile is more complete.

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