mdfind equivalent on linux?

Question

ok, so I finally got a Macbook pro and to tell the truth I am astonished by both the architecture, speed, and os on this laptop. Mac OS X is a beautiful system, from the mach kernel up to finder and spotlight and speaking of spotlight, it truly blew me away when I just needed to execute this command to get all unix executables and ONLY unix executales:

mdfind "kMDItemKind == 'Unix Executable'"

Amazing!!! Really!!!

Now, the question is does anyone know of an equivalent unix or linux command that doesn't involve complex find incantations or doesn't return false positives (like someone perming all their images rwxrwxrwx ?

Answer 1

Not really, none of the other UNIX system have an indexer builtin the file system (except BeOS but it is not a UNIX system and mostly dead anyway). You can have something not too far with the locate(1) command on all BSD systems (the daily script create the locate database with locate.updatedb) but this is only enables you to find pathnames. It does not deal with metadata such as keywords and file types.

To be honest, this is one of the best things amongs others about MacOS X, just live with it :)

Answer 2

Beagle, MetaTracker, Strigi, and even Google Desktop are all desktop indexers for Linux. What's there by default depends on your distribution (some may have none at all), and they all have different tools and interfaces, but the first three support Xesam, so xesam-tool can provide a mdfind-like command-line interface.