Search for System FIles

Question

I have eight student servers running 10.5.4, and I would like to search the home directories for specific files to delete. For instance, in Tiger I could do a simple search for "com.apple.desktop.plist", get a nice list from all student homes where I could delete them en mass. In Leopard it seems not to search Library files. If in the finder search box I select "Other" I expect a list of attributes like System files, but unlike the desktop I sit at now the list is blank. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Hi Ikern, you could try something like sudo find /path/to/users/networkhomedirectory/ -name "com.apple.desktop.plist" -exec rm '{}' \; in terminal changing the /path/to/users/networkhomedirectory/ to suit your set up and the "com.apple.desktop.plist" for the file you want to find.
This command will find all the files with that name in the location you point it to and delete them.
We used to use a similar command to delete the ._ files on our Windows Shares before the advent of dot_clean.
If you want a list of found files rather than delete them try find /path/to/users/networkhomedirectory/ -name "com.apple.desktop.plist" >> foundfiles.txt
this will create a txt file of the found files.
This may allow you to do what you want until the search function is fixed.
Cheers