- How To Search A Mac For Files By Date
- How To Search A Mac For Files Containing A Text Phases
- How To Search A Mac For A Document
PDF documents are probably the most commonly used set of documents in most offices today because of their ability to be locked from accidental changes or unauthorized modifications by users. However, it’s a lot easier to find something you’re looking for in a Word document than it is for a PDF document because by default Windows search indexes all of the text inside of a Word document, thus making it easy to search all Word documents quickly.
Always search file names and contents (NB: will be a slower search) Open a Windows Explorer window Alternatively, you could add the location to your indexed locations. How to search for files containing text in Mac OS X Terminal. Search Files and Directories for Patterns of. Find all local IPs and MAC Address with arp-scan - Duration: 2:44.
The text inside PDF documents are not indexed by Windows or by most desktop search programs, so if you need to find a particular PDF doc, you have to manually open each one and perform a search. If you’re simply looking for some text in one PDF, it’s not a problem, but if you need to scan through many PDF documents in a directory, you can use the Advanced PDF search features in Adobe.
Adobe Reader
With the advanced search, you can search all PDF files in a directory and it’s sub-directories in a single go. By default, if you open Adobe Reader and press CTRL + F, you’ll get the normal search box. It is located at the top right.
How To Search A Mac For Files By Date
To use the advanced PDF search option, you can choose Advanced Search from the Edit drop down menu or press SHIFT + CTRL + F.
Go ahead and enter the phrase you are searching for in the search box. Next choose the All PDF Documents In option under Where would you like to search heading.
Browse to the folder where all of your PDF documents are stored and then choose the options for the search. These include Whole words only, Case-Sensitive, Include Bookmarks, and Include Comments.
Click Search and all PDFs under the current folder will be scanned for your term. Just click on the hyperlink in the results to open the file!
Foxit Reader
If you’re using a different PDF viewing program like Foxit, which I highly recommend, then you can also search multiple PDF files easily. Once you run the program just click on the little folder search icon that is located to the left of the search box at the top right of the program screen.
When you click on that icon, a pane will appear on the right-hand side of the program window and you’ll be able to search all PDF files located in a particular directory.
Just like Adobe, you have a couple of search options in Foxit also, including Whole Words Only, Case-Sensitive, Include Bookmarks, Include Comments and Include Form Data.
I really like the fact that Foxit also lets you search form data too. When filling out some insanely long INS forms years back, it was a life-saver being able to search within the form fields also, so that’s a plus for Foxit.
4 Answers
With command line you have several options. The 3 I use the most are...
locate {part_of_word}This assumes your locate-database is up to date but you can update this manually with:
sudo updatedbgrepas explained by dr_willis.One remark:-Raftergrepalso searched within directories.Example:find . -name '*{part_of_word}*' -print
Where . is the directory where you are at the moment and * is a wildcard.
Oh and you can also combine these. Example: locate {something}|grep {some_part_of_something}|more
If I recall correctly: locate is the fastest one (assuming your database is up to date) and find is the slowest one. And grep is the most complex but also the most versatile one of these since you can use regexes.
The grep command is commonly used for this.
grep PATTERN filename
and grep can do some very complex searching.
dr_willisdr_willisYou can use grep to list the files containing word in the given directory:
Here:
* -R recursively search files in sub-directories.
* -i ignore text case
* -l show file names instead of file contents portions. (note: -L shows file names that do not contain the word).
use man grep to get all the options