Find (files and text in files)

Search, Find, grep, sed stuff on your hard drives using regular expressions

Overview

Here are my notes on finding (and replacing) stuff within a Mac, including searching inside files and file metadata.

macOS Spotlight = mdfind

command+spacebar pops up the MacOS GUI dialog called Spotlight.

Commands there make use of a default background process that indexes the contents of every file and its metadata (such as date modified, etc.).

Search functionality is also available in the CLI Terminal command mdfind. Anything Spotlight can find, mdfind can find it too. The command to search for the word “essay” only within the Documents folder

mdfind -onlyin ~/Documents essay

See other filters below.

Alternatives to spotlight are free Raycast and licensed Alfred.

PROTIP: If you don’s use Spotlight or mdfind, turn off its indexing overhead entirely:

mdutil -i off

If Spotlight indexing isn’t working the way it should, erase the index and rebuild it from scratch:

mdutil -E

Spotlight/mdfind filters

To show metadata for a file, select the file, then choose File > Get Info.

To filter searches for metadata attributes:

“taylor swift” kind:document modified:<=7/29/23 searches for documents containing the word “taylor swift” (both words together) only in the Documents folder modified on or before a specific date.

The program is smart enough to recognize singular or plural:
- app = application = applications
- contact = contacts
- folder = folders
- email = emails = mail message = mail messages
- event = events
- reminder = reminders
- image = images
- movie = movies (MOV files)
- font = fonts
- presentation = presentations (PowerPoint files?)
- music (MP3 files)
- audio (mp3 files)
- pdf
- .md = markdown files?
author:tom searches for all items written by Tom.
kind:images created:8/16/23 searches for images created on a specific date.
kind:music by:“glenn miller” searches for music by Glenn Miller (both words together).

Search using AND, OR, and NOT

You can narrow search results using Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT). You can also use a minus sign (–), which means AND NOT, to exclude items when you search. Examples:

author:tom OR author:thom searches for items authored by Tom or Thom, if you don’t know the exact spelling of his name.
trip -france searches for items that contain the word “trip” but not “france,” so results might include photos from a trip to Spain but not to France.
kind:message date:6/29/23-7/25/23 NOT date:7/14/23 searches for email messages dated from 6/29/23 through 7/25/23, but excludes those dated 7/14/23.

Terminal commands:

cd to the folder you want searched. For example:

cd ~/gits/wilsonmar/wilsonmar.github.io/_posts

PROTIP: Drill down into the lowest folder you can. If you are too high in the folder hierarchy, you’ll encounter messages like these about protected folders and files not processed:

find: ./.DocumentRevisions-V100: Permission denied
find: ./.fseventsd: Permission denied
find: ./.MobileBackups: Permission denied
find: ./.Spotlight-V100: Permission denied
find: ./.Trashes: Permission denied
find: ./dev/fd/3: Not a directory
find: ./dev/fd/4: Not a directory
find: fts_read: Permission denied

Grep Utilities

See the version of the Grep utility installed:
```
grep --version
```
example response:

grep (BSD grep) 2.5.1-FreeBSD

PROTIP: The Mac was created from a base of BSD (Berkeley System Distribution) and Linux goodness is added.
Display just the filenames containing the word “foo” throughout the whole drive:
```
grep -r -l "foo" .
```
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-recursively-search-all-files-for-words/
```
grep [options] PATTERN [FILE...]
```

-F, –fixed-strings Interpret PATTERN as a list of fixed strings, separated by new- lines, any of which is to be matched.

-x, –line-regexp Select only those matches that exactly match the whole line.

-q, –quiet, –silent Quiet; do not write anything to standard output. Exit immedi- ately with zero status if any match is found, even if an error was detected. Also see the -s or –no-messages option. </pre>

egrep

fgrep

### Use find command to show text within files

For example, find text “»»» HEAD” within files by diving recursively into the current folder and down (represented by a period) :
```
grep -ri ">>>>>> HEAD" .
```
TIP: Remove the i to not ignore case distinctions.
To find text “»»» HEAD” within files of “.md” type at the current folder path:
```
find . –name "*.md" –print | xargs grep ">>>>>> HEAD"
```
Use -print0 option to find filenames that contain spaces or other metacharacters:
```
find /path/to/dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -l "foo"
```
Find file names

See 15 Practical Linux Find Command Examples
Use the GNU find command to look for all files with .app file suffix:
```
find ~/Applications -type f -name "*.app" \
2>/dev/null 1>$HOME/find-all-apps.txt
edit $HOME/find-all-apps.txt
```
~/Applications specifies looking into just that folder. Alternately, / by itself specifies all files in the entire drive.

-type f specifies return of matches to file names.

2>/dev/null sends “access denied” errors to a null device so you don’t see them.

-iname instead of -name searches insensitive to case in the specified search string.

find path -printf “%f\n” to print just the file name and exclude the path.

find … -exec basename {} \; does the same.

1>$HOME/find-all-apps.txt sends output to a file in the user’s home folder.

NOTE: By default a line counter is inserted before each item found.

Count the number of lines in the file created above:

wc -l "$HOME/find-all-apps.txt"

Example response:

     760 /Users/wilsonmar/find-all-apps.txt

Create a md5 hash for each file found:

#! /bin/bash
cat "$@" | while read -r line; do
 printf %s "$line" | md5sum | cut -f1 -d' '
done

sudo find "~/Downloads" -exec md5sum {} \;

Find all empty files in directory:
```
find ~/Pictures -empty
```
WARNING: There can be a lot of these.
Find the word “server” with case -insensitive in a file:
```
grep -i "Server" /etc/ntp.conf
```
The “-i” for insensitive capitalization.

The response contains the word “server” searched:
```
server time.apple.com.
```
Find lines that don’t (-v to reverse search) begin with # (specified by a ^) or blank lines (specified by a ^) to the end of line $:
```
grep -ve'^#' -ve'^$'/etc/ntp.conf
```
The response:
```
server time.apple.com.
```

Last 10 files modified anywhere

Time utility

Find the last word “server” with case -insensitive in a file:
```
time find . -xdev -type f -print0 | xargs -0 stat -f "%m%t%Sm %N" | sort -rn | head -n 10 | cut -f2-
```
The time utility captures how long the command takes to run. It’s needed because the “find .” command looks at every file in the whole operating system.
```
real  1m1.537s
user  0m32.894s
sys   0m29.795s
```
Stat utility

NOTE: Use the Linux stat command:

stat -f "%m%t%Sm %N" /tmp/* | sort -rn | head -10 | cut -f2-

which returns, for example:

Mar 25 16:38:45 2018 /tmp/wbxgpc.wbt

This is such a useful command that you can make an alias of it in ~/.bash_profile:
```
alias last10="stat -f "%m%t%Sm %N" /tmp/* | sort -rn | head -10 | cut -f2-"
```

Regular Expressions

We’ll use the spelling dictionary of English words that comes with Linux.

ABCs of Regex

Search for words ending with “fine”:
```
grep 'fine$' /usr/share/dict/words
```
$ (Shift+4) specifies search from the end of string.

Responses include “refine”.
Search for words beginng with “fine”:
```
grep '^fine' /usr/share/dict/words
```
^ (Shift+6) specifies search from the beginning of string.

Responses include “refine”.
Search for “fine” anywhere within the line:
```
grep 'fine' /usr/share/dict/words
```
Search for lines containing “fine” anywhere within words:
```
grep 'fine' /usr/share/dict/words
```
Whitespace
Search for a space before “system” in lines, such as either “system” or “file system”:
```
grep '\ssystem' /etc/ntp.conf
```
Search for any word boundary after “server” in lines, such as “servers” or “serverless”:
```
grep 'server\b' /etc/ntp.conf
```
PROTIP: The response “server time.apple.com” is the server used for Network Time Protocol used to update your machine’s clock.

Reverse search
Return lines that do not start with # for comment:
```
grep -v '^\s*#' /etc/hosts
```

Search for specific characters C or c:

grep '[Cc]'

Locate command database

sudo locate whatever

WARNING: The locate database (/var/db/locate.database) does not exist.
To create the database, run the following command:
 
  sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist
 
Please be aware that the database can take some time to generate; once
the database has been created, this message will no longer appear.

Quantifiers

Search for “color” or “colour” in any line, using a combination, including a ? to specify the previous character u as an optional character:
```
grep '\b[Cc]olou?r\b' /usr/share/dict/words
```
u+ matches one or more occurrences.

u* matches zero or more times.

u{4} matches exactly four occurrences.

Enhanced grep:
Return words with five consequtive vowel characters:
```
grep -E '[aeiou]{5}' /usr/share/dict/words
```
BTW, “euouae” (pronounced your-you-ee”) consists only of vowels.

Regex ranges
Search for characters, upper and lower case ranges from A to Z, plus underscores:
```
grep '[A-Za-z_]' ???
```
Search for just numbers range 1 through 9:
```
grep '[0-9]' ???
```

sed command

The Linux sed utility replaces contents within a file.

To delete empty lines and comment lines:

sed -i.bak '/^s*#/d;/^$/d' somefile

somefile

-i.bak generates a backup (file .bak in this case).

The semicolon separates multiple specifications.

Windows

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/search-file-contents-windows/

Hidden files

If you are searching for hidden files:

How to Search the Content of Your Files on Windows

Using Utility programs

KDiff3

P4Merge

Search Using IDE

Within VSCode,

See https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/codebasics

For multi-select, press Alt+click.
To get the Find dialog press ctrl+shift+F .
To get the Find & replace dialog press ctrl+H .
For simultaneous search and replace, press ctrl+shift+H

Within Eclipse,

press ctrl+F for the Find dialog.

Press ctrl+H for Find & replace.

Search are multi-line by default in Eclipse when you are using regex:

(\@Length\(max = L_255)\)([\r\n\s]+private)

Make a custom find command

https://itnext.io/increase-developer-productivity-with-unix-bash-command-one-liners-2973bccd7600

More on macOS

This is one of a series on macOS:

Wilson Mar