Q:

mdfind equivalent on linux?

Mac OS X is a beautiful system, from the mach kernel up to finder and spotlight and speaking of spotlight, it truly blew me away when I just needed to execute this command to get all unix executables and ONLY unix executales:
mdfind "kMDItemKind == 'Unix Executable'"

Amazing!!! Really!!!
Now, the question is does anyone know of an equivalent unix or linux command that doesn't involve complex find incantations or doesn't return false positives (like someone perming all their images rwxrwxrwx ?

A:

Beagle, MetaTracker, Strigi, and even Google Desktop are all desktop indexers for Linux.  What's there by default depends on your distribution (some may have none at all), and they all have different tools and interfaces, but the first three support Xesam, so xesam-tool can provide a mdfind-like command-line interface.

A:

There are 3 ways to go about this under Linux.
1. use a location tool
You can use the commands locate, which, and whereis to find programs and files matching a pattern on your system. 
2. executables are kept in designated areas
90% of the executables on a Linux system are either installed under /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /bin, or /sbin so it isn't really a mystery what executables are available.
3. use find
Use find to locate files that have their executable bits set (--x--x--x). 
% find . -executable -type f

4. use your package manager
You could also use your Linux distros' package manager (yum, apt, etc.) to find out what executables are installed for either a given package or all the packages installed.

A:

Not really, none of the other UNIX system have an indexer builtin the file system (except BeOS but it is not a UNIX system and mostly dead anyway).  You can have something not too far with the locate(1) command on all BSD systems (the daily script create the locate database with locate.updatedb) but this is only enables you to find pathnames.  It does not deal with metadata such as keywords and file types.
To be honest, this is one of the best things amongs others about MacOS X, just live with it :)

