Find Any File
Find Any File is a program for Mac OS X that lets you search for files on your disks.
- Contrary to Spotlight, it does not use a database but instead uses the file system driver's fast search operations, where available. This lets you search for file properties such as name, dates, size, etc., but not for file content (use Spotlight or EasyFind for that).
- Find Any File can find files that Spotlight doesn't, e.g. those inside bundles and packages and in inside folders that are usually excluded from Spotlight search.
- Finally, it is quite fast. A search only takes a few seconds.
Find Any File doesn't replace Spotlight, but it complements it greatly:
- If you search for content, such as in e-Mails, PDFs, Word docs etc., use Spotlight.
- If you search for files by name, size or date, use FAF, as only then you can be sure that everything is found.
Not convinced yet? Read this review of FAF at MacWorld.com
Features
Find Any File has a few gems that other search tools do not offer:
It sports a new hierarchical view for the found items. You can switch to it using Command-2 or click on the right little icon at the top of the results window:
Note that the search above revealed hundreds of hits. If you'd look at that many results in a flat list, it would be hard to browse. With this new hierarchical view, however, you can directly look for the results in the folders that interest you.
- If you hold the Option key (alt) down in the Find window, the Find button turns into Find All. If you click on it then, you are asked for an administrator password - and then Find Any File will restart with root permissions, being able to find really any file on your Mac's volumes (something that Spotlight won't do). Note that this will only work on local disks, not on network mounts, though.
- You can save your entered searches to files (they'll have the extension ".faf"). You can then double click them in the Finder to have them start the search immediately, or use the saved search as a preset.
Search Examples
Have you just installed or launched a program for the first time and like to see what it modified or added to your disks? Here's a way to do that (it excludes .DS_Store files from the results because they're not really relevant to this question).
Searching for files only inside your Music folder that are neither in AAC nor in MP3 format and which are at least a megabyte in size? So you could enter two Name criteria as follows, along with a minimum size. Also note that the search is limited explicitly to the Music folder.
Or you might want to find all Numbers documents created in 2009 only.
To learn more about Find Any File's many features, see the manual.
Alternatives to Find Any File
If you like to search for data inside files, and Spotlight doesn't do it for you, have a look at EasyFind by DEVONtechnologies. It offers a few extra search options (e.g. wildcards), displays results a bit neater and has a single-window user interface which you might prefer. Since version 4.6 (released in Nov 2010) it also uses the fast disk search function that Find Any File uses (CatalogSearch), where appropriate.
If you want to search for specific text in a large set of files inside a directory, I recommend TextWrangler.
To see which files, applications and folders occupy the most space on your disk (FAF can't search for app sizes, only regular file sizes), consider DaisyDisk.