How to pipe mdfind to grep with a pattern and then cp

Question

I have been trying to come up with a mdfind to locate certain files. I am not using find because it takes too long to search across a windows drive and I am on a Mac. I have indexed using mdutil and now simply want to search for files with the pattern where the file in the path starts with example. "/Volumes/DRIVE/SOME/PATH/DAD14-BLAH-BLAH.jpg". There must be a simpler way to use mdfind to look for a jpg greater than 500k and grep the path with a pattern? Below is the code I have come up with but no results are returned. Any help is deeply appreciated.

cat filelist.txt | while read -r FILE; 
   do mdfind -onlyin /Volumes/DRIVE/ 'kMDItemKind = "*image" && kMDItemFSSize > 500000' -name "$FILE" -0 
   | xargs -0 -I{} grep -i -E '.*\/[a-zA-Z]{1,3}[0-9]+.*\.(jpe?g|png|tiff?|psd)' {} 
   | xargs -0 -I{} cp -a {} ./images; done;

Bass

Ken Thomases · Answer 1 · 2017-03-13T15:25:00.357

0

You don't want to use xargs for the grep command. Doing so means grepping the contents of the found files for matches of the pattern. You want to actually grep the output of mdfind.

That also means you don't want to use -0 with mdfind. You want each file path to be on a separate line, since grep is going to output the matching lines. Therefore, you don't want to use -0 with the final xargs command, either.

You probably want to require that the extension is at the end of the string. And you want the explicit slash (/) in your pattern to be the last slash in the string.

cat filelist.txt | while read -r FILE; 
   do mdfind -onlyin /Volumes/DRIVE/ 'kMDItemKind = "*image" && kMDItemFSSize > 500000' -name "$FILE" 
   | grep -i -E '.*\/[a-zA-Z]{1,3}[0-9]+[^/]*\.(jpe?g|png|tiff?|psd)$' 
   | xargs -I{} cp -a {} ./images; done;

edited Mar 13 '17 at 15:25

answered Mar 13 '17 at 05:22

Ken Thomases

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Thank you for that swift response, I tried that but keep getting the following error: **xargs: insufficient space for argument** – user5188505 Mar 13 '17 at 05:30
Could it be that there are spaces in the filename hence why I was originally using the -0 option ? – user5188505 Mar 13 '17 at 05:42
Oops, I neglected to remove the `-0` from the remaining `xargs`. I've fixed it. – Ken Thomases Mar 13 '17 at 15:25
Thank you for that! I think the problem however may lie in the **'kMDItemKind = "*image" && kMDItemFSSize > 500000'** section and have no idea why mdfind doens't like these attributes? – user5188505 Mar 13 '17 at 21:52
Now I am getting a **xargs: unterminated quote** error ? – user5188505 Mar 13 '17 at 21:55

How to pipe mdfind to grep with a pattern and then cp

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