Comments on: Disable Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

By: How to Disable (or Enable) Spotlight in Mac OS X Mountain Lion

How to Disable (or Enable) Spotlight in Mac OS X Mountain Lion — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:26:04 +0000

[...] approach is to use the older indexing method of “sudo mdutil -a -i off” which turns off indexing only, but more on that in a [...]

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 17:11:57 +0000

I turned off spotlight, it said “Indexing disabled” but the mds and the mdworker processes are still running 90% of my CPUs. I tried killing them and they just keep starting up again. How can I turn the thing off?

By: CyberMac

CyberMac — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 02:58:45 +0000

I was wondering why none of the above Terminal commands would turn Spotlight back on, then I remembered I’d used ‘Cocktail’ utility to turn it off & no amount of commands would override that! lol, turned it on in that, then I could use the System Prefs of Spotlight to keep control of what I needed. You can use Cocktail to turn on or off each individual HD, which is very useful.

By: SwankOne

SwankOne — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 21:18:24 +0000

Totally worked for me. You da man!

By: BM

BM — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:04:15 +0000

Also, running ‘sudo mdutil -i off /’ *should* remove all files and directories under /.Spotlight-V100, which is where all of the indexing files/folders are stored. Further, you’ll need to use sudo to get a listing of what is below this directory, e.g.:
sudo ls -laR /.Spotlight-V100

By: BM

BM — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:55:07 +0000

Perhaps this was caused by a “duh” moment, like mine:
Before running the cls instructions listed above, I tried using the System Pref for Spotlight, putting the whole drive in the Privacy tab so that it would not be indexed. I forgot to remove this, then ran the ‘sudo mdutil -i off /’, which, btw, worked. I then went to re-enable this and could not! Using the ‘Spotless’ utility, I also couldn’t enable Spotlight, but there was a message displayed that led me to looking at the System Pref for Spotlight, removing the boot drive from the Privacy tab. Once I did this, ‘sudo mdutil -i on /’ worked again!

By: thor

thor — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 01:33:45 +0000

DUUUUDE, BLESS YOU one million zillion times. you are the MASTAH. I have searched for this solution for days and days. THANK YOU BROTHERMAN. you rock. seriously

By: ashok

ashok — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:39:09 +0000

Man,
you are god. spotlight was dead. so many things didnt work. Then i tried this and it worked like a charm.

thanks a tonne.

regards
ashok

By: xblubbx

xblubbx — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 08:57:41 +0000

We use an external LDAP Server and want to disable indexing for all users.

Does sudo mdutil -a -i off disable indexing for all users on one machine or just for the current user?

By: telephoner

telephoner — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 10:53:51 +0000

Or you can just use “sudo mdutil -i off” to turn indexing off.

By: jack

jack — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 18:07:24 +0000

Thanks for the tip.

So much for the “user friendly” OS – no way to suppress a basic annoyance without getting your hands dirty with the command line. And what an annoyance it is – slowness, unable to eject a flash drive because of the indexing, the disk space wasted on the index (quite significant on a flash drive)…

By: Bry

Bry — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 05:29:12 +0000

sudo mdutil -a -i on

just worked for me – im running 10.6.8 snow leopard

By: Omri

Omri — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:14:51 +0000

It’s not -o, it’s -on

By: Corey

Corey — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 15:51:44 +0000

Leave a space between the -R and /.Spotlight-V100

By: ken

ken — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 03:52:25 +0000

after months of having Spotlight hung at indexing – and after trying the first commands suggested for Console here [which only turned off indexing of 1 out of 3 drives connected!] i’ve used Spotless to completely turn off Spotlight. And now Time Machine [which also was hung at 'calculating changes' - and NEVER worked - on my brand new iMac 29" i7] now works as it should. Thanks to Vincent & Darren. a brilliant and simple little app. Does what it says on the label.