Find Any File (FAF)

Search Beyond The Spotlight

Unhappy with Spotlight because it does not find files that you know to be there? Use FAF to find every file on your disks, including those usually hidden. By file name, date, size, and even plain text content (including RTF, Word and Excel files, but not PDF files – see note below).

• Recover a file whose name you partially remember?

• See what files got changed in the past 5 minutes?

• Find all the largest files on your disk?

• Uninstall software that leaves files in hidden places where Spotlight doesn't look?

• Search with regular expressions?

Find Any File (FAF) is the perfect tool for these tasks.

You can even search on disks that are not indexed by Spotlight, including network server (NAS) volumes.

Find Any File can find files that Spotlight doesn't, e.g. those inside bundles and packages, and inside system folders that are usually excluded from Spotlight search.

Contrary to Spotlight, it does not use a database but instead searches the data on disk directly. This lets you search for file properties such as name, creation and modification dates, file size, even plain text inside files, but also makes it slightly slower. However, since FAF now includes Spotlight results where possible, you'll still get such results as quickly as with Spotlight search in Finder.

Another useful feature is its hierarchical results view (see screenshots). It lets you view the found items within their respective folders, making it often much easier to browse through 100s of found items.

•• Note about text search inside files ••

  FAF can search file content only in plain (unformatted and RTF) and in zip-compressed text files (as used by Word and Excel for instance), and with less freedom than what Spotlight search offers in this regard. For instance, limit your search to single words, and use several "Text content" rules if you look for multiple words in a file. Also, while it's not as fast as Spotlight, it's still much faster than using Unix tools such as grep, because FAF uses all available CPUs for the search concurrently.

For finding text in PDF and other files that encode or compress the text in other formats, FAF can still find text in them, provided that Spotlight has indexed the files, because FAF includes Spotlight results by default.

•• Here's what users say about FAF ••

  “FAF goes where Spotlight's can't easily reach.”

  “As the administrator for about 50 school Macs, I often need to look for some file misplaced by a novice or, while troubleshooting a system, I often need to search for obscure operating system files. Find Any File is in my arsenal of tools when things files or folders go astray.”

  “I use it when I want to find a specific kind of file or to see and eliminate or compare the double and redundant files. I surely use it 4-5 times a week.”

  “I keep FAF as an icon in the toolbar of every Finder window. When I have to actually find something, I use FAF instead of the Finder.”