(First off, as a disclaimer, I no longer work for Dropbox, I don&#x27;t speak on their behalf. I&#x27;ve only used the feature as a user.)<p>I don&#x27;t know a common search&#x2F;find system that open()s or read()s files during the search by default. AFAIK Spotlight and Windows search are indexed searches. As for the indexing operations, I don&#x27;t know how that is handled, they could disable indexing for remote files, or they could somehow integrate with indexing.<p>Based on my testing of a pre-released version of the feature (it isn&#x27;t released yet), if you were to do something like `find ~&#x2F;Dropbox -type f -exec md5 {} +`, it would download files.<p>As a user it did exactly what I expected. I was truly amazed. It was totally seamless and amazing.<p>Compared to the complexity of what has already been implemented, solving the problem of &quot;I want to recursively open&#x2F;read every file in my Dropbox, but I don&#x27;t want it to download terabytes of data and fill by hard drive&quot; seems fairly simple. For example there could be a setting for the maximum about of space Dropbox will use up, e.g., 40 GB, plus Dropbox could be smart enough to detect disk usage. If you `grep -R` it may download&#x2F;open&#x2F;read the files, once you reach 40 GB or near your disk capacity, Dropbox could start removing local copies of files that are not pinned to be local, i.e., remove the files that were downloaded because of the open()&#x2F;read(), not the files you explicitly told it to keep local. I don&#x27;t know how the team will choose to implement these features, but I&#x27;m confident that it will be well-thought-out and tested.<p>Remember, Dropbox is the company that especially monkey patched the Finder to get the sync icons (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mjtsai.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2011&#x2F;03&#x2F;22&#x2F;disabling-dropboxs-haxie&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mjtsai.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2011&#x2F;03&#x2F;22&#x2F;disabling-dropboxs-haxie&#x2F;</a>). They will go to great lengths for a seamless user experience, and do a ton of testing. I have no doubt that when Project Infinite is widely available it will be amazing, seamless, and have functionality many people thought wasn&#x27;t possible or only dreamed existed.