bperrybap:
Does osx include the find command? If so just run that from / and you should be able to find whatever you are looking for.
You could use linux instead. Popular distros like ubuntu, mint, debian, all have decent guis but don't have the restrictions.
With Linux you can unzip the ide image wherever you want and run it from there. You can even have multiple IDEs, which is what I do for regression testing.
--bill
Come on there is no restriction. Mac OS X is UNIX certified since 2007. (UNIX 03 certification)
(source)
So you can open a terminal, run a shell script and your favorite find command.
Remember this is a consumer environment, and the finder is designed to protect critical system files from being messed up by the average user and just not have him confused. Remember that on a Mac most users are admin by default, so can do some damage (not as bad as root). I've seen many folks tell me I was running low on disk space so I removed all this stuff but now somehow I'm having issues 
There are many ways to get around that
if you press the shift key and open the "Go" menu you'll see for example the "Library" folder which is hidden by default is now reachable.
in the "Go"menu, at the bottom you can select to go to a specific folder. select this option and that will open a small window where you type a unix path. type /var in the textfield and confirm and a finder window will open letting you see the /var directory
if you open a Terminal window, do a cd /var and then do open . (that's open and a dot to say current directory) that will open a finder window in the /var folder (or just do open /var)
if you really want to see all the files in finder, always, then you just need to tell the finder that it should not hide them
open a Terminal and type
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true
then relaunch the finder (go to the apple logo menu top left, select force quit, pick finder in the list and say restart).