At a glance

Our Verdict

Searching your Mac is pretty much a universal task—everyone will eventually need to find a file. Indeed, many people search for files often enough that making file-finding easier, faster, or more accurate is a good way for a utility to earn the Mac Gems badge—witness Tembo, EasyFind, MoRU, NotLight, HoudahSpot, and TorchFS. (The number of search-related Gems is also a reflection of the disappointing state of OS X’s built-in search interface.)

Find is the Unix command line tool for finding files (and more) /directory/path/ is the directory path where to look for files that have been modified. Replace it with the path of the directory where you want to look for files that have been modified in the last N days. Find Any File is capable of opening the file types listed below. Conversion between the file types listed below is also possible with the help of Find Any File. You can find more information about it in the application's manual.

My latest file-searching find, if you’ll pardon the pun, is Find Any File (Mac App Store link). If Tembo is a throwback to the search-results interface of Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4), Find Any File will remind many users of the Find interface of the “classic” Mac OS.

Launch Find Any File, and it presents you with a small, simple window for initiating your search. First you choose the location you want to search; your options include all mounted volumes, all local disks, just server volumes, any specific volume, or a specific folder you choose. (I’d like to see the Documents folder as a preset, as well.)

Below the location pop-up is where you enter your search criteria. By default, you get a single search option, set to Name Contains yoursearchterm. But you can modify this item, and you can add as many additional search criteria as you like by clicking More Choices. Your options for searching include name, modification date, creation date, size, item type (is or is not a folder, is or is not an alias), file-type code, and creator code.

Unlike Tembo, Find Any File doesn’t use OS X’s Spotlight indexes for searching; rather, it uses the file system’s search features. The advantage to this approach is that Find Any File can be faster than Spotlight for finding some files, and Find Any File can find files Spotlight doesn’t index—more on that in a moment. The downside is that Find Any File doesn’t search the contents of files.

Click Find, and in a few seconds Find Any File presents its results window. The default window displays a simple list of found items along with each item’s kind, modification date, and (for files) size. Select an item and you can view, at the bottom of the window, the folder hierarchy leading to the selected item.

But the more useful listing, in my opinion, is hierarchical (Tree) view. Switch to this view, and Find Any File lists each file within its folder hierarchy, letting you see, at a glance, where each found file resides.

In either view, you can select an item and press Spacebar to view a Quick Look preview of the item; you can also open the item, reveal it in the Finder, get info on it, or delete it (by either moving it to the Trash or deleting it immediately). The full path to the selected file appears at the bottom of the window; right-click (or Control-click) the path to copy it—in Unix or Mac format—to the Clipboard. If you enable Tooltips (View -> Show Tooltips), hovering your cursor over an item displays additional information, including creating date, file ownership and permissions, and type and creator codes.

Both views also provide options to show hidden files and to show package contents (the latter, when enabled, displays items found inside Mac OS X packages). A nice touch here is that Find Any File explicitly tells you how many hidden items were found: In the top-right corner of the results window is a count of items in the results window; if you see # not shown, you’ll need to enable one or both of the Show options to see everything.

Another useful feature is the capability to run with root privileges. Before starting a search, hold down the Option key, and the Find button becomes Find All. Click it, and enter your admin-level username and password when prompted, and Find Any File will be able to find system files and other restricted items Spotlight doesn’t even index. (Note that searching with root privileges won’t affect searches of network volumes.)

You can also save your searches as Find Any File documents. Double-click one of these saved searches, and Find Any File immediately runs the search again—a useful feature for queries you perform frequently. I also like that each time you search, Find Any File opens a new search-results window—it’s handy to be able to keep multiple results windows open at the same time. (However, the name of each window is based on the originating search’s first criterion; this means that if multiple searches use the same first criterion, there’s no way to determine which window belongs to which search.)

One glitch I did experience is that if you choose a specific folder to search, and you later want to search a different folder, there’s no obvious way to choose another custom search location. The trick is to first switch the location to one of the stock locations and then switch back to the custom-folder item, which will bring up the dialog to choose a new folder. But here’s a tip: You can just drag the desired search folder onto the location pop-up menu.

The biggest drawback of Find Any File is, of course, that it doesn’t search inside files. If you want to avoid Spotlight, the free EasyFind can search contents and provides a few additional options compared to Find Any File—although I much prefer Find Any File’s search-results display. I keep both utilities on hand, and I use them both regularly.

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Keeping your files in an online cloud locker means you can free up some space on your computer and get at your files from anywhere, using any device. But if you haven’t taken the time to explore a platform in depth, or if you use several and often get confused, you might find it harder to track down particular files compared to having them on a local hard drive.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. All the big cloud storage providers have useful tools for searching through your files and folders, whether you’re using a web browser, a desktop computer, or your phone.

Find files in Dropbox

Load up the Dropbox website, and you’ll see a deceptively simple-looking search box up in the top right-hand corner. There, type the name or part of the name of a file to start looking for it. A filter list appears on the right, so you can limit your search to specific document types and formats, like whether it’s an audio or video file.

You can also use the folder drop-down list on the right to limit your search to specific folders. If you’re on a paid-for plan, Dropbox will also show matches for text inside files, so if you can’t remember a file name, you’ll be able to find it using some keywords. You can use wildcards, too, so you can run searches for *.mp3 for all the files with an MP3 extension, for example; or *.docx to look for all your Word documents.

Unfortunately, you can’t limit your search to a particular date range, but you can click the Relevance column heading and change this to Last modified—this will show you the most recently edited or created files first. If you want to see the oldest files at the top, click the heading again and Dropbox will automatically sort them for you.

Find Any File Linux

The search boxes in the mobile and desktop apps work in a similar way, though you don’t get as many filtering options. You can still type out words or phrases you’re looking for in filenames and inside the files themselves (if you’re on a paid-for plan), and use the asterisk wildcard (*.mp3, *.docx, etc.) to search for particular types of files.

Find Any File App

Find files in Google Drive

You would expect Google products to come with a good search function, and that’s exactly the case with its cloud storage platform. At the top of the Google Drive web interface there is a large search box—results will include file names and documents that contain the words you used. As you type, relevant matches will appear. You can click on any of these to open a file, or hit Enter to see a full list of results.

The files will be listed by relevance—how well they match the words you searched for. To sort by date, click the Last modified link at the top, then choose Last modified. A new arrow icon will appear so you can toggle between seeing the newest files or the oldest files at the top of the list.

Find Any File Mac

To look for a particular type of file, click inside the search box without typing anything, then choose an option from the list (like Spreadsheets or Videos), and then add some keywords if needed. Select More search tools or Advanced Search (depending if you have a personal or a company account) at the bottom of the list of file types to narrow down your search by a custom time frame, by the owner of the file (if it’s shared), or by a particular folder location.

Most of these options are available in the Google Drive app on mobile as well—just tap in the search box at the top to get started. If you can though, it’s easier to use the web interface on the desktop, since some search options (such as searching inside a custom time frame) are not available in mobile.

Find files in iCloud

Apple only makes a minimal effort with iCloud Drive on the web and on Windows, so if you need to search through files on this service, we’d recommend heading to an Apple device to do the searching.

On macOS, open up Finder, then choose iCloud Drive from the navigation options on the left (if you can’t see it, choose View then Show Sidebar). Type your search terms, like a filename or a file type, into the search box in the top right-hand corner. In the results screen, click Date Last Opened to switch between seeing the oldest or the newest files first.

Find Any File Linux

Various options appear under the search box as you type. Enter “jpg” for example, and you can choose whether to look for files with “jpg” in the name, or for JPEG images. Use the small Plus icon below the search box to add more filters, such as the date files were created, or something you’re looking for in a file’s contents.

The iCloud Drive search on iOS and iPadOS isn’t as advanced, but it’s there if you need it. Open up the Files app, switch to the Browse tab, and enter your terms into the search box at the top, making sure iCloud Drive is selected as the location. Again, if you enter a file extension (like “jpg” or “docx”) the system will ask you if you want to look for files of that type.

Find files in OneDrive

All Files And Folders On This Computer

Your OneDrive locker on the web has a Search everything box up in the top left corner. Click inside this box, then start typing to run a search. You’ll see suggested matches as you type—you can click on those, or you can select See more results to see a full list.

OneDrive searches on filenames and inside documents too, like plain text files, PDFs, and Word files. Use the Type and Date drop-down menus at the top to limit the results by file type and date respectively (you can choose to only see matching photos from the last week, for example).

Find Any File App

Of course you can also search through your OneDrive in Windows, as the two Microsoft products are tightly integrated. From File Explorer, choose OneDrive from the panel on the left (select View then Navigation pane if you can’t see it), enter your keywords into the Search OneDrive box in the top right corner, and results will pop up on screen. You’ll also see various options appear on the Search menu at the top, enabling you to filter results by file type, size, and the date they were last modified.

You can also run wildcard searches with an asterisk, like *.jpg to find JPEG files and *.docx to find Word documents. These wildcard searches work in the OneDrive mobile apps as well, although you don’t get many other options on your phone. From the front screen, tap the Search icon (top right) to run a query.

Find Any File Converter