List all tags in Terminal in Mavericks?

Question

Is it feasible to list all tags already defined in OS X in Terminal?

I know there are some third-party applications that list all tags, but I just want to use Terminal to find all tags, since I use this tool to work with tags in Terminal (but unfortunately the tool doesn't provide to list tags for an entire system - it just lists for a single or multiple files selected arbitrarily).

Thanks.

Answer 1

The tags name are in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.list.

You can read it with

defaults read com.apple.finder.plist ViewSettingsDictionary

It will need some parsing to be a bit clearer :

defaults read com.apple.finder.plist ViewSettingsDictionary | 
    awk 'NR%12==2'| grep -o '".*"' |  sed 's/^.\(.*\).\{18\}$/\1/'

Other possibility is parsing the plist as xml. To do that you'll need to first convert the plist from binary to xml using.

plutil -convert xml1 ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist

Answer 2

You can also use tag:

tag -tgf \*|grep '^    '|cut -c5-|sort -u

tag -f \* finds all files with tags, -t includes tag names in the output, and -g prints each tag on a separate line.

Answer 3

That list isn't comprehensive. It's only tags added through Finder. There's an additional file ~/Library/SyncedPreferences/com.apple.finder.plist, that also lists the tags that have been manipulated in Finder.

If you tagged a file in Terminal or using another tool and never manipulated the tags in Finder, then the tags won't be in either list.

Answer 4

You can also use mdfind in combination with mdls to get the same result:

/usr/bin/mdfind -0 "(kMDItemUserTags == '*')" |xargs -0 mdls -name kMDItemUserTags |grep '^    ' |cut -c5- |cut -d , -f 1 |sort -u

Would be interesting to benchmark, which one is faster.

Answer 5

Colour followed by path:

/usr/bin/mdfind -0 "(kMDItemUserTags == '*')" | xargs -I % sh -c 'echo $(mdls -name kMDItemUserTags % | grep "^ " |cut -c5-) %'