Can "mdfind" search for phrases and not just unordered words? Is there a way to search for an exact phrase using the mdfind utility? For example, I created two text documents titled "test1" and "test2". The contents of "test1" are:


  I love Apple


And the contents of "test2" are:


  Apple love I


When I type this in terminal (I placed both files in ~/Documents):


  mdfind "I love Apple" -onlyin ~/Documents


I get:


  ~/Documents/test1.txt
  ~/Documents/test2.txt


How would I search for the exact phrase "I love Apple" so mdfind only returns results containing those words in that order (in this case only "test1.txt")?
You need to escape your quotes like so:

mdfind \"I love Apple\" -onlyin ~/Documents


This results in just the one document being found:

~/Documents/test1.txt


Without escaping them, I don't think the quotes actually get passed to the mdfind command, they're just interpreted by your shell to say that I love Apple is a single argument. With the backslash-escaping, the argument then includes the quote characters.