Instructions on how to get Mac OS X Finder to display the size of your folders. This is especially useful if you are trying to free up space on your drive and want to determine which files. You can learn more about general Spotlight search operators for OS X here, or read a few more specific use cases, like locating large files on the Mac with size searches, or finding files from a specific date with another operator set, or even searching system files in Mac OS X.

There several ways to find files in OS X, the most popular of which are GUI-based routines such as the Spotlight menu and the Finder search, both of which offer quick access to the system's metadata search index. However, there are other options for accessing this index and otherwise finding files you might be interested in locating.

Of course besides Apple's GUI options there are some third-party searching tools available; however, without these the other option in OS X is to use the Terminal, which can benefit both Terminal and GUI-based routines. The first option in the Terminal is the classic 'find' command that is common to many Unix systems, which will recursively walk a specified folder hierarchy and search items for a given name pattern. The find command has a number of options you can use to narrow down search results, and these can be looked up on its, but the basics for finding a file are to specify the starting path and the name, such as the example here to locate a file called 'test.txt' starting in the Users directory: The find command will try to enter any folder in the specified path, which can result in 'Permission denied' errors, but for files that your account has default access, this command should reveal them properly.

Screenshot by Topher Kessler/CNET find /Users -name 'test.txt'. Since the find command walks through the filesystem hierarchy, it may take a long time to complete, and if you specify the root folder only (without using flags to prevent recursion), it may recurse through the /Volumes/Macintosh HD/ mount point directory repeatedly and never end the search.

Beyond the find command are two that offer indexed search results. The first of these is the 'locate' command, which will build a database of system resources and then allow you to find them by simply typing the following command: locate NAME In this command, NAME can be any partial file name and the command will output the full path to any item that includes this name. The locate command does require a properly built 'locate' database, which Apple blocks by default in OS X; however, you can enable the launch daemon that regularly builds and updates the locate database with the following command: sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist The locate command will show system files either by full or partial name.

And exFAT external hard drive is faster that FAT32 at reading and writing data. It eliminates the two major deficiencies of FAT32, which has no limitation on partition size or file sizes. Method 3: Format external hard drive as NTFS NTFS is the default file system on Windows. External hard drive for mac. It's a great way to share external hard drive between Mac and Windows.

Screenshot by Topher Kessler/CNET After this command is run, after a while the locate database will be assembled and be ready to use, but once it's completed you can use the locate command to search for numerous system files that you might know of by name. Refx nexus 2 mac torrents. Do keep in mind that this command will only search for system files and will not index the user directories for finding personal files. The final command is the 'mdfind' command, which will locate files on your system that have been indexed for use with Spotlight. This command is arguably the more thorough of the two prior commands, as it will search both user and system files by default, and also offer options to search by file name and by file content, just like Spotlight searches. To use this command, simply run it as follows; it will output a list of full paths to the files that include the search term: The mdfind command will locate files in your user directory, as well as those in the system. In this case, the same file was found as part of an developer application installation in the User directory, as well as in the system directory. Screenshot by Topher Kessler/CNET mdfind NAME As with all of these commands, the mdfind command has a number of additional options that can be implemented for limiting and customizing its search scope, which can be looked up in the.