Basic Examples (8) 

Search files in your current directory for the string "elephant":

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Search on your current file system:

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Search on all available file systems indexed by Spotlight:

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Search for files that contain all the given words:

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Search for files that contain one word but not another:

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Search for files that were created or modified on a particular date:

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Search for any folder that has "Library" in its name:

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Search for music files by a particular artist:

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Scope (6) 

Use metadata attributes to find Wolfram notebooks at any level in the current directory:

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Find notebooks that have "the" in their file name:

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Find notebooks that have "the" in their file name and "elephant" in their text content:

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Find movie files that are longer than 60 seconds:

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Find PNG files that have an alpha channel and more than 5 million pixels:

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Find files that have been changed in the last week:

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Properties and Relations (4) 

File lists can be analyzed in all the usual ways:

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Import a random PNG image with an alpha channel:

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Files found by Spotlight can be opened with SystemOpen:

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FindList can be used to extract lines containing a given string:

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Possible Issues (3) 

Spotlight does not index files inside of .app bundles, such as your Wolfram System installation directory:

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Spotlight can find matches in a file’s metadata, so a file’s contents may not contain the search string:

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If quotes in your search string are not properly escaped, mdfind will give an error and return a nonzero exit code:

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Neat Examples (4) 

Learn about notebook-specific metadata keys and values with the mdls utility:

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Use that metadata to find notebook files that have more than a thousand input cells:

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Find notebooks that use a nondefault stylesheet:

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Find palette notebooks:

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Learn about metadata keys and values for any file of interest with the mdls utility:

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Use that metadata to search for files with the same content type:

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