Finding specific things

Searching inside files

Updated 2026-08-05 · 6 min read

Scan_2019_04_11.pdf tells you nothing about what is in it. Content search is the only way in, and macOS has four of them.

When you need this

The filename is useless. Scanners, phone cameras, downloads and default templates all produce names carrying no information:

• Scan_2019_04_11.pdf
• IMG_4471.pdf
• Document (3).docx
• Untitled.pages

No filename index will ever find these, however clever its matching. Cling, for instance, is filename-only by design and says so. The text inside is the only handle.

Route 1: Spotlight

Type the phrase into Spotlight. When its index is healthy this is the best content search on the Mac — importer plugins cover more formats than any third-party extractor ships with, including formats installed by other apps.

The catch is silent failure. If the importer is missing, the format unsupported, or the PDF is a scan with no text layer, you get nothing and no explanation.

Route 2: Finder, scoped

In a Finder window, type in the search field and choose "Contents" rather than "Name". Then scope it to a folder rather than This Mac. Slower, but it tells you what it searched.

Route 3: the command line

grep -ril "henderson" ~/Documents
mdfind -onlyin ~/Documents "henderson"

grep reads files directly — it will not read PDFs or Word documents, which are compressed or binary. mdfind queries Spotlight's index, so it finds what Spotlight found and misses what Spotlight missed.

For PDFs specifically, pdftotext (from poppler) plus grep works and is scriptable.

Route 4: a scoped content index

Some tools extract text from a folder you nominate and index that. Everywhere does this — ours — for PDFs and Office documents in folders you choose, with contains:henderson searching the extracted text. Scoped deliberately: reading every file on a disk uninvited is not something an index should do, and most of a Mac is not documents.

The one that defeats all four

A scanned PDF with no text layer is an image. Nothing above will find a word in it, because the word is not present as text — only as pixels. You need OCR first: Preview can export with text recognition on recent macOS, and most scanner software offers it.

If a document you are certain contains a phrase cannot be found by any method, this is almost always why.

Common questions

Why can Spotlight not find text inside my PDF?

Most often the PDF is a scan with no text layer, so the words exist only as pixels. Otherwise the importer is missing or the index is stale.

Can grep search inside Word documents?

No. .docx files are compressed archives, so grep sees binary data. Use Spotlight, or extract the text first.

Do file finders like Cling search contents?

Cling does not — it is filename-only by design. Some indexed finders add scoped content search over folders you choose.