Macos – How to search all documents for a specific phrase in macOS

macossearch

We've read other questions similar to this and the answers they received but none of the answers proved satisfactory.

We want to search the contents of all documents on our Mac for the two word phrase “ten days.”

We've tried Spotlight and Command+F.

  • Spotlight did not produce useful results.
  • Using F we specified search of “This Mac,” kind=any, contents=ten days, ignore case and whole words only. This search resulted in documents containing only the word “days” and the word “written,” (among others.)

We are not programmers so we don't write code nor do we know how to use commands which are code. We just want to find the phrase.

Best Answer

If you just want to find a file with a name Just go to the terminal
cd into the following directory (type cd and keep a spance drag and drop the folder and hit return) and type

find . | grep -irl "filename"

or if want to find a phrase in all documents just type 

grep -irl "phrase" .

i - for ignore case r - recursive l - list (remove the l to see all the occurances) . - is the current directory

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