Mdfind and the apostrophe

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In terminal if I type

mdfind -onlyin ~/"Desktop/Shows I Watch" "Bob"

I get the output

/Users/brendans/Desktop/Shows I Watch/Bob's Burgers

As I would expect. But if I try

mdfind -onlyin ~/"Desktop/Shows I Watch" "Bob's Burgers"

I get nothing. I've tried lots of different escape keys for the apostrophe, but they all return nothing.

Here's a list of everything I've tried:

mdfind -onlyin ~/"Desktop/Shows I Watch" "Bob\'s Burgers"
mdfind -onlyin ~/"Desktop/Shows I Watch" "Bob\''s Burgers"
mdfind -onlyin ~/"Desktop/Shows I Watch" "Bob''s Burgers"
mdfind -onlyin ~/"Desktop/Shows I Watch" "Bob\\'s Burgers"
mdfind -onlyin ~/"Desktop/Shows I Watch" "'Bob'\\''s Burgers'"

What am I missing here?!?

Best Answer

You need to escape the single apostrophe with a single backslash and do not quote the show name if it has an apostrophe, just escape any spaces with a single backslash too, as in the examples below:

$ mdfind -onlyin ~/Desktop/"Shows I Watch" Bob\'s\ Burgers
/Users/name/Desktop/Shows I Watch/Bob's Burgers
$ mdfind -onlyin ~/Desktop/Shows\ I\ Watch Bob\'s\ Burgers
/Users/name/Desktop/Shows I Watch/Bob's Burgers
$

It should actually work with the show name in quotes as in the first example you have under "Here's a list of everything I've tried:", it worked on my system.

$ mdfind -onlyin ~/"Desktop/Shows I Watch" "Bob\'s Burgers"
/Users/name/Desktop/Shows I Watch/Bob's Burgers
$

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At the risk of stating the obvious, 'sort'.

e.g. mdfind -onlyin "$MUSICROOT" -literal "$MDQUERY" | sort

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The sort command has lots of options, including sorting on particular fields if you want more control.

Edit: The below shell script function will provide the desired sort in the specific case mentioned:

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{
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Can “mdfind” search for phrases and not just unordered words

You need to escape your quotes like so:

mdfind \"I love Apple\" -onlyin ~/Documents

This results in just the one document being found:

~/Documents/test1.txt

Without escaping them, I don't think the quotes actually get passed to the mdfind command, they're just interpreted by your shell to say that I love Apple is a single argument. With the backslash-escaping, the argument then includes the quote characters.

Best Answer

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