Finale Forum

I may have lost a coupla Finale files on my mac. They are not showing up on
a regular search. Is there a more in-depth search that I can try?

Have you tried the EasyFind app? I use it all the time.

gogreen wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 14, 2020 10:18 pm

Have you tried the EasyFind app? I use it all the time.

Do you have it working over Mojave? Been reading reports that it isn't compatible with APFS.

I've been using Find Any File.app which worked well over Mojave (v1.94) has just been updated to 64 bit (v2.0) for Catalina compatibility. It's $7.99 through the App Store or from the developer as shareware—he asks for a $6 donation but it works whether you give him money or not (I was glad to give him the $6). It is not good at finding content but great for my needs.
https://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/index.php

Shareware... until I found this a couple of years ago, I didn't realize it was still out there.

Surely the ability to find all files matching some sort of wildcard string is built into the Mac? If not, you should be able to do it from the UNIX shell:

find / -name \*.musx

something like that.

motet wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 23, 2020 2:42 am

Surely the ability to find all files matching some sort of wildcard string is built into the Mac? If not, you should be able to do it from the UNIX shell:

find / -name \*.musx

something like that.

You had to go there... I laughed hard — that made my morning. That particular command doesn't work on a Mac, BTW, but you're right on being able to find anything through the command line interface in Terminal.app in the Utilities folder.

The generic Apple find command is mdfind followed by the name you're looking for. This will display the path to the object that contains the text.

mdfind whateverfileyouwant will find anything with that name (substitute your file name) including contents, mentions in stored email etc.. You may pull up many or even hundreds of paths with that name but, if it's anywhere on your system, it will show up. Works far better if you filter your search.

Use mdfind whateverfile.mus to find any Finale file (or older Encore and a few other notation app files) with that name. It will find .mus and .musx. If you only want .musx, then use that suffix instead. If you want to find all .mus and .musx files, the command is mdfind .mus Likewise, mdfind .musx finds .musx only.

The cheapware find apps are only a simple GUI and filter set for mdfind but they save you many hours vs simple searches in Terminal.

I'm not sure why you find that funny. "find" has been part of UNIX forever. From the mdfind "man" page (note the last line).

motet wrote: ↑

Sat Jan 25, 2020 2:33 am

I'm not sure why you find that funny. "find" has been part of UNIX forever. From the mdfind "man" page (note the last line).

You weren’t joking?

Yikes.

I wasn't kidding, but it's true "find" is more for technical folk. It's very powerful--do a Google search for "man find"

I'm surprised there's no file find built into the Mac and that you need to resort to find or mdfind or a third-part interface to the latter. I thought that's what the "finder" did. Windows has something in the file explorer that does what it sounds like mdfind does, but I find it often returns too many results. Sometimes you just want to search file names, not the contents of everything.

motet wrote: ↑

Sat Jan 25, 2020 7:13 am

I wasn't kidding, but it's true "find" is more for technical folk. It's very powerful--do a Google search for "man find"

I'm surprised there's no file find built into the Mac

I explained earlier the other thread that there is — but Spotlight ain't it.

The Find menu, either Finder/File/Find or ⌘ f can locate anything on a Mac but you have to understand a non-intuitive filter interface—which I do and that's still what I use but it's a PIA for most users. The 3rd party utilities are a lot more user-friendly and don't filter as tightly as Apple does which can let most users locate things more easily.

For reasons unrelated to this topic, I was restricted to OS 10.13.3 on my 2010 iMac. Unfortunately, that version of the OS had a bug: Finder/File/Find didn't work. That's when I discovered Find Any File.app which saved my bacon. There are others but that one worked well enough so I paid the man to make the Buy flag go away.

When I bought my iMac Pro, I was able to run OS 10.13.6 (now 10.14.6), the bug had been fixed and I'm back to Finder ⌘ f as I've used for over 30 years.

The 3rd party utilities, like the command line interface, tell or show you where a file is located. If Spotlight locates a file, you can open it from there—but that's rarely what I want. Only ⌘ f will let me attach a file by clicking on it.

Without going into what I do, I attach a lot of files to documents, contracts, research, correspondence and databases in the course of a day. 100 or more is not unusual. These attachments can be any of thousands of files stored on my Mac. I don't have time to go looking; they need to be found as fast as I can think about them.

BTW, I tested Find Any File.app in Catalina and it works there, too. I don't expect to ever use it, however.

mbfind will locate files in places that most users don't know exist such as APFS back up volumes (there are 24 such volumes, one per hour on most Macs since High Sierra if Time Machine is enabled), Time Machine etc. That's why it must be filtered. This guide is nearly 6 years old and most links don't work but it's as good as anything else I know.
https://www.macissues.com/2014/04/29/co ... -terminal/

Mike: Sorry I missed your quote and question concerning my post about EasyFind. Yes, It works fine for me in Mojave--no problems at all.