Spotlight alternatives

Often, Spotlight will spend too much time indexing a drive or not include locations or files properly in the search results. While these problems are fixable, some people may opt to use a Spotlight alternative that may yield more thorough search results.

Here are some popular Spotlight alternatives:

• Google Desktop
• Easy Find
• Foxtrot

Command-line searching:

• locate

  This command is relatively simple, in that it will search all directories on the file system for files with a given name by searching through the locate database. In this sense, it is similar to spotlight; however, it is not using a metadata index for the search. The search will present the full paths to the file when a match is found. To run the command, use the following syntax:

  locate STRING

  In this command, "STRING" is the search query.

• find

  This command is a more complex search that will walk a specified directory tree to locate string matches instead of relying on an index or database. It is slower than "locate," but it is more thorough. To perform a basic search with this command, use the following syntax:

  find /PATH/ -name STRING

  This will start the search from the directory "/PATH/" and will search for the query "STRING". The full paths of any matches will be displayed.

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