Today one of the most dreaded things happened to me, the phrase that makes every IT professional shudder. I can not find my file. Ok, after running through all of the basic questions and making sure that they saved it and that it was not accidentally deleted I decided to search their hard drive.

After many un-sucessfull attempts at using the search functionality (Spotlight), I decided to do some research on other methods for searching for files on the OSX platform. I came across the “locate” command for the Terminal.

I had never used this command before so I did some reading and I ran

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sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

this ran the initial database rebuild which added many new entries into its database. I then ran

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locate 'File Name here.txt'

and came up with a nice list of files on the users computer, however the problem was that all of the files we found were older revisions of the file that he had lost. I decided that the only way we were going to find his file was to use a much more aggressive approach.

I decided to use the “find” command, this works similar to the “locate” command but it searches the folder, directory or Read more..