MacOS – How to add Spotlight comments to the bundled OS X apps

A Finder alias (not a symlink) will be added to spotlight, if it's sitting in a visible folder, like Applications.

You can create them programmatically using AppleScript (use osascript to integrate with other shell scripts.)

To create an alias use make alias file to {file to alias} at {destination of alias}.

By default (ie. if destination isn't specified) the alias is created on the current user's Desktop, ie. ~/Desktop.

Here's an example script to create an alias of a file in /Applications

set target_app to POSIX file "/usr/path/to/app"
set alias_dest to POSIX file "/Applications"

tell application "Finder"
  make alias file to target_app at alias_dest
end tell

By the way, osascript accepts input from stdin, so to run an AppleScript in a shell script, using a heredoc will work. It may make it easier for you to setup the target file better:

#!/bin/bash
TARGET=/usr/path/to/app
osascript <<EOS

set target_app to POSIX file "$TARGET"
set alias_dest to POSIX file "/Applications"

tell application "Finder"
  make alias file to target_app at alias_dest
end tell

EOS

The comments should normally show up in Spotlight results after you close an information window in Finder. You can tell Spotlight to reindex directories or files with mdimport, but it should do that automatically most of the time.

The Spotlight comments seem to be stored in both .DS_Store files and extended attributes. But if a file is owned by root, Finder doesn't write the comment to an extended attribute, and it won't be seen by Spotlight either.

If you use xattr to add the comments, they are picked up by Spotlight, but they aren't shown in Finder's information windows.

sudo touch test
sudo xattr -w com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFinderComment somecomment test

If you open Finder as root, they are saved in both extended attributes and .DS_Store files.

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder