mdfind

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Level 1

9 points

mdfind

Quick question about mdfind. From what I've read (and I am most likely not understanding this correctly), you can use the mdfind command to search for files containing multiple words invoking it as:

mdfind "test|apple"

which would result in giving me the file paths of all files containing the words "test" and/or "apple". So far this just ends without displaying any results. So I guess I need to know how to run the command correctly.

Thanks!

PowerMac G5, Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on Jan 14, 2010 12:00 PM

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Answer 1

red_menace

Level 6

17,072 points

Jan 14, 2010 4:20 PM in response to tmcmurtr

You can always refer to the mdfind manual page for specifics, but you will need to build the query using the appropriate quoting and boolean expressions (for example, || is or, && is and).

Apple's Spotlight's Query Expression Syntax documentation also has more information about building a Spotlight query.

By the way, to format your code snippets, place them between two {code} tags.

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Answer 2

tmcmurtr Author

Level 1

9 points

Jan 19, 2010 7:27 AM in response to red_menace

Thank you. I was wondering if there was a quick way to remove the .xml and .webhistory from my searches. I do want to be able to search the entire hard drive's contents, but I wanted to exclude these results from my query.

Thanks!

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