mdfind search string with underscores not working

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cancer22 Author

Level 1

8 points

mdfind search string with underscores not working

I am migrating my method to find strings in files to mdfind.

But when I search for a string with underscores it does not find the file I should be finding.

Setup:

A file in a lone directory with the following contents:

this_is_a_test
thisIsATest

When I search for thisisatest it works

% mdfind -onlyin . thisisatest
..../test/afile

but if I search for this_is_a_test it does not work, I get no output returned

% mdfind -onlyin . this_is_a_test

Is there some secret sauce to search for strings with underscores?

Any help is appreciated.

MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

Posted on Jan 27, 2021 11:12 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

VikingOSX

Level 10

126,588 points

Jan 27, 2021 12:40 PM in response to cancer22

The mdfind command is for locating files based on substrings of their filename or certain specified document attributes, associated with the file. It has nothing to do with actual document content. For that, you want one of the grep family.

You run the mdls command on a given filename and the keywords for those attributes are shown for the particular document.

Let's say you want to search for shell script category documents:

mdls -onlyin . 'kMDItemContentTypeTree == "public.shell-script"'

This will list the full POSIX path of every script file (e.g. zsh, sh, py, pl, etc.) that is present. Doesn't care about the internal contents.

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Answer 2

VikingOSX

Level 10

126,588 points

Jan 27, 2021 1:15 PM in response to cancer22

The mdfind command uses the long-form attribute names, and the Spotlight and Finder search interfaces allow you to use shorter more language-focused keywords. I can usually find what I want from the Spotlight or Finder search boxes without resorting to mdls on the command-line.

From the Spotlight or Finder window search panels, you can locate documents containing particular single-word, or quoted strings. This is far faster when appropriately used than playing with e/grep.

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Answer 3

VikingOSX

Level 10

126,588 points

Jan 27, 2021 11:36 AM in response to cancer22

Not my experience here with Big Sur 11.1.

touch find_this_lethargic_underlined.txt
mdfind -onlyin . find_this_lethargic_underlined.txt
~/Desktop/find_this_lethargic_underlined.txt

Works with or without the file extension.

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Answer 4

cancer22 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jan 27, 2021 12:17 PM in response to VikingOSX

The filename works, but rather I was concerned about looking at the contents of the file.

I'm still seeing inconsistent behavior. See below:

% echo "this_is_a_test\nthisisatest" > afile                 
% mdfind -onlyin . this_is_a_test
% cp afile bfile.txt
% mdfind -onlyin . this_is_a_test
% touch cfile
% cat afile >> cfile
% mdfind -onlyin . this_is_a_test
% touch find_this_lethargic_underlined.txt
% mdfind -onlyin . find_this_lethargic_underlined
.../find_this_lethargic_underlined.txt
% cat afile >> find_this_lethargic_underlined.txt
% mdfind -onlyin . this_is_a_test                
% cat find_this_lethargic_underlined.txt
this_is_a_test
thisisatest
% echo "this_is_not_a_test" >> find_this_lethargic_underlined.txt
% mdfind -onlyin . this_is_not_a_test                            
.../find_this_lethargic_underlined.txt

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Answer 5

cancer22 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jan 27, 2021 1:07 PM in response to VikingOSX

That makes sense. Guess I was under the impression that mdfind uses the same indexes that spotlight search uses and that these indexes were on file contents too.

I have a find/grep for what I want to do, its just not very fast.

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mdfind search string with underscores not working

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