Recover from Temp?

[Ben Rubinstein]

Ben Rubinstein wrote:

> More directly relevant to Scott's problem; I don't know what it means 
> when Spotlight displays a dotted line icon either.  An hypothesis, since 
> Spotlight (even when just searching for filenames not content) searches 
> in its database rather than in the file system, would be that if it 
> finds a matching record in its database, but then couldn't the file 
> actually on disk, Spotlight might choose to display that in this way.  
> It could be that Spotlight happened to index in the interval between Rev 
> creating the backup file and deleting it.
> 
> The other thing I'd try would be to open the terminal and use "locate", 
> eg "locate myFile.rev".  I have a feeling that on current versions of OS 
> X, locate uses the Spotlight database; but I'd at least expect it to 
> give you a more unambiguous report.

I've just looked at the man page for 'locate', and it says:

    The locate program may fail to list some files that are present, or may
    list files that have been removed from the system.  This is because
    locate only reports files that are present in the database, which is typ-
    ically only regenerated once a week by the
    /etc/periodic/weekly/310.locate script.  Use find(1) to locate files that
    are of a more transitory nature.

- Ben