[Curiosity]

How do I search for a specific type of document containing a specific word within a particular directory and its subdirectories? For instance, I want to find .css documents with the word "window" in a directory called "Global", and its subdirectories.

[Chuckit]

Go to the directory called Global, hit Find, choose Kind: Cascading Style Sheets and Name: window. Or does that not work for some reason?

[Curiosity]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

Go to the directory called Global, hit Find, choose Kind: Cascading Style Sheets and Name: window. Or does that not work for some reason?

No, that does not work. Should it not be Contents: window? Anyway, that did not work either. If I do the search as Kind: Others... Cascading Style Sheet file with Contents as window, it does not fetch anything. I know that word is in some of those files.

[WJMoore]

cd ~/The/Path/To/Global
find . -name "*.css" -exec grep -q window {} ';' -print

If you want that explained let me know.

[Curiosity]

Originally Posted by WJMoore 

cd ~/The/Path/To/Global
find . -name "*.css" -exec grep -q window {} ';' -print

If you want that explained let me know.

I understand everything up to and including the word "window". Why the braces and the semicolon enclosed in single quotes? Why the "-print"? I do not want to print the list, I just want to see it on the screen and refer to it.

[Chuckit]

The -exec argument executes the following arguments (up to the semicolon) as a command. The "{}" inserts the name of the current matched file, and the semicolon is in quotes because otherwise the shell would interpret it (and prematurely end the command!) instead of passing it literally to the find command. The -print means to print the results to the screen.

[WJMoore]

What he said

[Curiosity]

Thanks for the help, people.

[CharlesS]

So complicated.

Why not just open the Global window and type "window .css" into the Spotlight field?

[WJMoore]

Depends on your point of view. I work with UNIX every day at work so using find is just automatic. Plus I don't trust Spotlight all the time because even if a file just contains text it must be of a known extension to get indexed. I learnt this the hard way when I was trying to find a CUE file that contained the name of a certain song. Spotlight never found it because it didn't index cue files. find however came to the rescue. BTW this is the case with CSS files, they aren't indexed by default:

Code:
wmoore$ mdls afile.css 
afile.css -------------
kMDItemAttributeChangeDate     = 2006-11-11 11:14:10 +1100
kMDItemContentCreationDate     = 2006-11-10 00:00:42 +1100
kMDItemContentModificationDate = 2006-11-10 00:00:42 +1100
kMDItemContentType             = "dyn.ah62d4rv4ge80g65x"
kMDItemContentTypeTree         = ("public.data", "public.item")
kMDItemDisplayName             = "afile.css"
kMDItemFSContentChangeDate     = 2006-11-10 00:00:42 +1100
kMDItemFSCreationDate          = 2006-11-10 00:00:42 +1100
kMDItemFSCreatorCode           = 0
kMDItemFSFinderFlags           = 0
kMDItemFSInvisible             = 0
kMDItemFSIsExtensionHidden     = 0
kMDItemFSLabel                 = 0
kMDItemFSName                  = "afile.css"
kMDItemFSNodeCount             = 0
kMDItemFSOwnerGroupID          = 501
kMDItemFSOwnerUserID           = 501
kMDItemFSSize                  = 7
kMDItemFSTypeCode              = 0
kMDItemID                      = 65300
kMDItemKind                    = "CSS style sheet"
kMDItemLastUsedDate            = 2006-11-11 11:14:10 +1100
kMDItemUsedDates               = (2006-11-10 00:00:42 +1100, 2006-11-11 11:00:00 +1100)

The same file renamed to .txt gives:

Code:
wmoore$ mdls afile.txt 
afile.txt -------------
kMDItemAttributeChangeDate     = 2006-11-11 11:17:12 +1100
kMDItemContentCreationDate     = 2006-11-11 11:17:12 +1100
kMDItemContentModificationDate = 2006-11-11 11:17:12 +1100
kMDItemContentType             = "public.plain-text"
kMDItemContentTypeTree         = (
    "public.plain-text", 
    "public.text", 
    "public.data", 
    "public.item", 
    "public.content"
)
kMDItemDisplayName             = "afile.txt"
kMDItemFSContentChangeDate     = 2006-11-11 11:17:12 +1100
kMDItemFSCreationDate          = 2006-11-11 11:17:12 +1100
kMDItemFSCreatorCode           = 0
kMDItemFSFinderFlags           = 0
kMDItemFSInvisible             = 0
kMDItemFSIsExtensionHidden     = 0
kMDItemFSLabel                 = 0
kMDItemFSName                  = "afile.txt"
kMDItemFSNodeCount             = 0
kMDItemFSOwnerGroupID          = 501
kMDItemFSOwnerUserID           = 501
kMDItemFSSize                  = 7
kMDItemFSTypeCode              = 0
kMDItemID                      = 65765
kMDItemKind                    = "Plain text document"
kMDItemLastUsedDate            = 2006-11-11 11:17:12 +1100
kMDItemUsedDates               = (2006-11-11 11:17:12 +1100)

Note that it now has a known content type (kMDItemContentType). There is an easy solution to this. The Spotlight preferences should allow a type to added to an existing content importer. This can be done manually by editing the content importer but shouldn't be necessary.