Women in Technology

Article:		The Power of mdfind
Subject:		mdfind2
Date:		2006-01-05 18:09:06
From:		schwa
Forgive the self advertising - but you might also want to check out mdfind2 - a mdfind replacement that I wrote that outputs XML: http://toxicsoftware.com/blog/index.php/weblog/mdfind2/

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• mdfind2
  2006-01-06 11:00:41  kwidholm [View]
  
  
  That's a nice program, but too bad you decrease its usefulness and adaptability by making it a standalone replacement for mdfind instead of something that you can pipe mdfind into. Why not follow the flexibility and power of the command line tradition by making your program usable like this:
  mdfind "search terms" | mdxml > found_items.xml
  
  Assuming you would then change the name of your program to mdxml.
  
  You don't have to worry about making and maintaining an interface to mdfind functionality, and users can do so much more with your tool.
  
  
• mdfind2
  2006-01-07 22:42:12  schwa [View]
  
  
  What you're suggesting is a mdls command that takes a --xml switch. You could then use something like:
  
  mdfind -0 'foo' | xargs -o mdls --xml
  
  Unfortunately mdls doesn't take a --xml switch. So I'd have to write a "mdls2" command and I bet someone would complain that "too bad you decrease its usefulness and adaptability by making it a standalone replacement for mdfind".
  
  Of course if you truly wished to harness the "flexibility and power of the command line tradition" then you could take the output of mdfind, pipe it through xargs and mdls and then through some awful sed/awk/perl abomination to convert the output of mdls into xml... I'm sure it would be extremely graceful, easy to use and easy to maintain...