[Mac] Find a file using filename in macOS Terminal

In order to find a file on the Mac Terminal, you can make use of the find or mdfind command.

find – walk a file hierarchy

find <path-to-find> -name <name-of-file-to-find>

% find /Users/code2care/Desktop -name key.pem

Note: You might get pop-up alerts saying "Terminal would like to access your XXXX", which you need to allow to look for the file and you may see console logs saying Operation not permitted

mdfind command

mdfind – finds files matching a given query

% mdfind -name key.pem

2022-10-31 23:37:51.443 mdfind[97925:2194875] [UserQueryParser] Loading keywords and predicates for locale "en_US"
2022-10-31 23:37:51.443 mdfind[97925:2194875] [UserQueryParser] Loading keywords and predicates for locale "en"
/Users/code2care/Desktop/key.pem
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/Library/Frameworks/Python3.framework/Versions/3.9/lib/python3.9/site-packages/future/backports/test/ssl_key.pem

Note: The mdfind command makes use of the Spotlight database to provide search results, so it is faster compared to find command. As it does not have to do the scanning the whole file system for the query, but on the other side, its database may not be up-to-date as indexing is delayed so you may not find the file that may exist.