Apple - Are the OSX Mavericks tags visible from the command line?

Yes, you can find files that have a given user tag using mdfind.

Create a file and assign it a a custom tag in Finder.

Then go in a terminal; you will find it with:

mdfind "kMDItemUserTags == Math || kMDItemUserTags == Programming"

mdfind "kMDItemUserTags == Math && kMDItemUserTags == Programming"

See also -onlyin aFolder to restrict the search.

I didn't check how complex these boolean expressions can be, but these two examples work.

You can pipe the output to ls like this:

mdfind "kMDItemUserTags == mathTag || kMDItemUserTags == anotherTag" \
| while read f; do ls "$f"; md5 "$f"; done

Also, mdfind has an option "-0"

    -0                Use NUL (``\0'') as a path separator, for use with xargs -0.

which can be practical with nasty filenames.

I'm assuming they will be an xattr like they currently are on 10.8.3 (and older)

Currently, you can view which extended attributes a file has with ls -l@.

But to see the contents of the attributes, you have to use xattr.

You can get all tags of a file with:

mdls -name kMDItemUserTags filename

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