Find A File Installed By Brew

I installed a homebrew formula to satisfy a dependency for a Rails application. Related to the whole mimemagic debacle, I had run brew install shared-mime-info. The specific file that Rails needed from this install was freedesktop.org.xml.

It took me two commands to figure out if that file had been included and where it was living.

The first was to find the brew prefix directory — the place where homebrew had installed everything related to shared-mime-info.

$ brew --prefix shared-mime-info
/usr/local/opt/shared-mime-info

Now that I know about that directory, I can use fd—a more user-friendly alternative to find—to find the specific file in that directory. Not wanting to cast too narrow of a net, I decided to look for any xml file in that directory.

$ fd -e xml . /usr/local/opt/shared-mime-info
/usr/local/opt/shared-mime-info/share/shared-mime-info/packages/freedesktop.org.xml

The -e flag specifies the file extension. The . is the first argument, the pattern to look for. In this case, anything. The second argument (/usr/local/opt/shared-mime-info) is the path to look within. In this case, the brew prefix for the shared-mime-info package.