Re: [Avid-L2] Way OT: searching for 'packages' but not folder/directories or files.

I would like to find everything that presents as a 'package' regardless of it's file extension.  'Packages' can have any file extension that you can make up.  If I knew all the extensions I was looking for it would be easy to find them.  But I really do want to scan through many TB of backups and locate everything that presents as a 'package' and not get returns that are normal folders or files.

Thank you,

Jay

On Apr 8, 2021, at 5:27 PM, Mark Spano <cutandcover@gmail.com> wrote:

Any time I need to do advanced file finding (or almost any file finding) on Mac, I use Find Any File.

https://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/

You can perform a search as root (just add your administrator user password), and add multiple criteria to match. If you know the extensions, you can add them individually and it will find all.

Quickly: 

Find: Name / contains any of / .pkg .mpkg .app .photolibrary

hold option + click Find All

Be careful about .app since it will match on anything .apple which includes prefs for all Apple files (like com.apple.Finder etc.)

Once the results are shown (FAF is pretty fast), you can sort them by Kind which includes things like Application, Archive, etc.

I would try this first, since it's free, pretty easy, and might get you what you need with only a slight amount of fuss.

On Thu, Apr 8, 2021 at 5:27 PM Jay Mahavier via groups.io <jay_mahavier=icloud.com@groups.io> wrote:

This is super extra OT, but hoping that I can find some help here that doesn't go to far unix guru (because I'm not that smart).

I'm on a Mac, OS 10.13, and I want to search through some old backup drives and find all the 'packages' but just the packages and not things that identify as regular folder/directories or regular files.

Packages being things like Applications, .photolibraries, installer packages, etc.  They are technically a directory, like a folder, but present at a file.  So if you do a command line list (ls -l) they have a d upfront.  And at the finder level if you right click on them you get an option to show package contents.

So I'm looking for a way to find anything that is in this weird category, but I don't want to find 'normal' directories and files.

Does anyone have any tips, tricks, or tools to help me do this?


Thank you very much.

Jay