September 2008
Beginner to intermediate
426 pages
10h 42m
English
Content preview from Mac OS X For Unix Geeks, 4th EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 2. Searching and Metadata
If a Unix geek needs to find something on her system, she’ll probably use locate or find, depending on what she’s looking for. Because locate is based on a static database that’s regenerated only periodically (see Periodic Jobs” in Chapter 4), it would be the best choice for things that don’t change a lot (e.g., virtually anything in /usr). It’s also much faster because it has that database to consult. Trusty old find, slow as molasses, is what you want when you need more control over the search or when you’re looking for something that locate doesn’t know about, such as files that have been created recently.
Beginning with Tiger, though, Mac OS X has offered another search capability: Spotlight, which stores file metadata and sifts through it faster than a herd of sheep can clear a field. Spotlight comes in two forms: a GUI interface accessible from the menu bar, and a suite of command-line utilities. This chapter introduces you to Spotlight and shows you how to take advantage of all it has to offer.
Spotlight
Remember the relentless disk grinding you heard after you first installed the operating system? That was Spotlight creating its initial database. Spotlight is a repository of metadata for certain types of files. It gathers information about any file (or data record, such as an iCal event or video file) for which it has an importer (an operating system plug-in that extracts metadata from a file). To see all the importers on your system, look ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.