Disable Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
10.6, How to, Tips & Tricks - September 20th, 2009 - 18 Comments
Disabling Spotlight in Snow Leopard is pretty easy, launch the Terminal and type the following command:
sudo mdutil -a -i off
This tells the Spotlight manager to disable all indexing on all volumes, the command will require your administrative password to execute.
Re-enabling Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is just as easy, just reverse the command to:
sudo mdutil -a -i on
Now Spotlight indexing will be back on and work as usual.
Any advantage of doing this if you have a modern decent spec mac?
Will this kill the menu bar icon too? Hope so.
[...] Source: OSX Daily [...]
I turned it off, but it won’t turn back on.
sudo mdutil -a -i o
Error: unexpected indexing state (o)
When I run sudo mdutil -E /, I get Indexing disabled.
Also tried this:
sudo rm –R/.Spotlight-V100/
rm: –R/.Spotlight-V100/: No such file or directory
Spotlight commands do not work for me. Always disabled and everything I have done to enable spotlight has not worked. Including reinstalls of the Snow Leopard that must have had a Microsoft employee sabotaging it!
@Diane Ross
You are entering the command wrong, it’s
sudo mdutil -a -i on
you are entering ’sudo mdutil -a -i o’ and mdutil is not recognizing ‘o’ as an option and it’s throwing an error
anyway the above commands worked fine for me but I like Spotlight so I will keep it, thanks
Geting the mac to reindex using several methods, including those here and a day’s worth of calls to apple, did not work. In the end a shareware worth more than the seventeen bucks I paid for the relief of the lack of spotlight agony, called spotless 3.x worked like a dream. My find and spotlight both work and the glitch that was unglitchable by other means is fixed and the machine is working much faster. Why that last result beats me, but I am not questioning.
for mr flawless, who commented:
“Any advantage of doing this if you have a modern decent spec mac?”
Well, *if it’s done right* – like this:
orion:~ robertm$ sudo su -
Password:
orion:~ root# cd /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/Metadata.framework/Support/
tar -cvf mdworkstuff.tar ./
(saves all md* to a tarball in case you ever want it back)
then :
rm mdworker
rm mdworker32
rm mds
rm mdwrite
sync;sync;reboot
(OSX reboots) ..
and everything – and I mean *everything* runs at least 30% faster:
- even Lightroom importing / rendering previews of 400 CR2 files..
robertm,
How do I undo your script above?
Thanks.
Mr. Flawless,
if you have a Dual G4 with 4GB taking care of 60TB of files it can save you from having to go to the datacenter and poweroff the box because it’s hung trying to index all that storage.
Works to turn off Spotlight , but not to turn back on.
Has anyone come up with a way to undo this; when I type the command that is suppose to turn “Spotlight” back on (mdutil -a -i on) as root I get “Spotlight server is disabled” as a result.
Found a way to fix this; try the following commands for unloading and reloading the spotlight server engine:
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
if you get an error on the unload just do the load line as the service may already be off.
When using the command “sudo mdutil -a -i off” it turns of indexing on all drives except my backup drive (the one linked to Time Machine) – any ideas why?
See polymorpheus’ post on this page for your answer as to why the “sudo mdutil” method is not the best t use:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=105067
I used Spotless to kill Spotlight.
How do I get rid of the spotlight icon in the menu bar and then get it back if I decide to let the beast run on my computer again?
I found this command to get rid of the SpotLight menu bar icon, but would like to know how to bring it back before I try it…
<>
To remove the menu bar icon, run this Terminal command:
sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search
You’ll then to restart the menu bar with killall SystemUIServer to see the icon vanish.
Then how do I bring it back?
(Sorry my post is broken into 3 posts)