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

By: Vincent

Vincent — Thu, 13 May 2010 06:04:49 +0000

Then how do I bring it back?

(Sorry my post is broken into 3 posts)

By: Vincent

Vincent — Thu, 13 May 2010 06:04:16 +0000

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.

By: Vincent

Vincent — Thu, 13 May 2010 06:03:33 +0000

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…

By: Dd

Dd — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:32:55 +0000

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

By: nate

nate — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 04:23:14 +0000

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?

By: anthonyg

anthonyg — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 04:14:38 +0000

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.

By: anthonyg

anthonyg — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:41:07 +0000

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.

By: anthonyg

anthonyg — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:21:29 +0000

Works to turn off Spotlight , but not to turn back on.

By: RigoR

RigoR — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:52:55 +0000

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.

By: machinehead

machinehead — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 19:02:27 +0000

robertm,

How do I undo your script above?

Thanks.

By: robertm

robertm — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 04:07:51 +0000

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..

By: Richard McDonough

Richard McDonough — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 16:53:05 +0000

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.

By: Reddddddditor

Reddddddditor — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:12:18 +0000

@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

By: Richard McDonough

Richard McDonough — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:47:40 +0000

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!

By: Diane Ross

Diane Ross — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 03:51:13 +0000

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