searchfs

searchfs is a macOS command line tool to quickly search by filename on entire APFS and HFS+ volumes. Searching takes place at the driver level using the file system catalog. This means the volume's directory tree can be scanned much faster than with a standard recursive filename search using find.

Search is case-insensitive by default. Matching files are printed to standard output in the order they are found in the catalog. See the man page for details.

Download

• ⬇ Download latest searchfs binary (v0.4, <20 KB, ARM/Intel 64-bit, macOS 11.5 or later)

Documentation

• searchfs man page (HTML)

Install

git clone https://github.com/sveinbjornt/searchfs.git
cd searchfs
make
make install

Installs binary by default into /usr/local/bin/. Man page goes into /usr/local/share/man/man1/. These can be overridden with DEST_DIR and MAN_DIR.

Install via Homebrew

brew tap sveinbjornt/searchfs https://github.com/sveinbjornt/searchfs
brew install sveinbjornt/searchfs/searchfs

Performance

According to some basic benchmarks, searchfs runs up to 100x faster than find when performing full-volume search on APFS filesystems, and even faster on HFS+. This can be tested with the benchmark.sh script.

Although I have yet to test this properly, it is probably much faster than find on hard disk drives, which have higher seek times.

Testing

You need Python 3 installed.

python3 test.py

History Lesson

Apple added file system catalog search to Mac OS with the introduction of the Hierarchical File System (HFS) back in 1985. HFS replaced the previous flat table structure in the old MFS file system with a catalog file using a B-tree structure. Unlike Windows' FAT file system, HFS (and later, HFS+) thus arranged the entire directory tree into one large file on the disk, with interlinked nodes that did not match the hierarchical folder structure. This meant that volumes could be searched very quickly regardless of size.

Classic Mac OS exposed this functionality via the FSCatalogSearch() function, which iterated efficiently over the nodes, thus minimizing disk seek times. In the pre-SSD era, this gave the Mac a significant performance advantage over Windows when it came to full-volume search. For a long time, FSCatalogSearch continued to be available in Mac OS X / macOS via the Carbon APIs but it has now been deprecated and does not support APFS, Apple's new file system.

However, catalog search for both HFS+ and APFS is available in Darwin's low-level system libraries via the searchfs() function. The searchfs program makes use of this function.

Version History

See CHANGES.md

BSD License

Copyright © 2017-2025 Sveinbjorn Thordarson

See LICENSE.txt