APFS and Fast Catalog Search
The good news is: The APFS file system code has support for the lower level
searchfs
function, and that’s been already added in 2016, apparently, for OS X 10.12.[…]
As of now (10.12.6, 10.13 beta 3), the
searchfs
function does search case-sensitive and not case-insensitive as it should.[…]
Much worse, though, is that the high-level
FSCatalogSearch
is entirely broken for APFS. That’s why both EasyFind and FAF won’t find files the fast way on APFS volumes right now. I don’t understand whyFSCatalogSearch
doesn’t work, though - it’s supposed to simply call the lower-levelsearchfs
function, which on HFS+ volumes does still work fine. Unfortunately, Apple has declaredFSCatalogSearch
deprecated a few years ago, even though there’s no replacement function offered by the more modernNSURL
based API. Because of this deprecation it’s unlikely that this will get addressed.