How to Disable (or Enable) Spotlight in Mac OS X Mountain Lion
Completely disabling and reenabling Spotlight in Mac OS X Lion & OS X Mountain Lion can be done with the help of the Terminal. The following command unloads the Spotlight mds agent from launchd, thereby preventing the daemon from running or indexing any drives entirely.
Open up the Terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities/) and enter the following commands based on the need to either disable or reenable Spotlight indexing. This will effect indexing on all drives connected to the Mac.
Disable Spotlight
The primary method is using launchctl, this will require the administrative password:
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
Another 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 minute.
Reenable Spotlight
The guaranteed way to reenable Spotlight is to reload it into launchd using launchctl:
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
Again, the alternate approach is the indexing related “sudo mdutil -a -i on” command, but that method can throw the “Spotlight server is disabled” error and not allow you to turn it back on. If you run into that problem, use the sudo launchctl load command instead to enable both indexing and Spotlight.
With Spotlight reloaded launchd, the mds agent will immediately start running again to reindex the filesystem. Depending on the amount of changes and new files since the last time MDS ran, this can take quite a while. You can verify that MDS is running through Activity Monitor or by pulling down the Spotlight menu to see an “Indexing Drive Name” progress bar. Don’t be surprised to discover that MDS, mdworker, and the accompanying Spotlight processes take up CPU and use a fair amount of disk I/O as they reindex the drive, that is completely normal especially on initial reindexing after it’s been reenabled again. Simply waiting for it to finish is the best course of action.
Another option is to selectively disable Spotlight indexing of specific drives or folders by excluding them from the index, that is much easier to do and does not involve the command line at all, and instead you only need to drag & drop items into the Spotlight control panel.
Use whichever method is most appropriate for your needs. Spotlight is a powerful search tool for the file system and also works great as an application launcher, so it’s often best to selectively exclude items rather than to disable the entire service. Nonetheless, there are cases where turning Spotlight off completely makes sense, and knowing it can easily reenabled by using the command discussed above makes the process easy to reverse should the need arrise.
Is there any performance improvements when spotlight is disabled?
^ any performance gains?
Also, what are all those icons in your screenshots… man that’s a lot of apps you have running. (may grab a few, so let me know what they all are)
any chance to get rid of the search/spotlight icon top/right?
Yeah there is
Open terminal and type
sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search
press enter (type your password in if you have to) and then type
killall SystemUIServer
Should be gone now !:)
worked, thanks for the help!
is there a way to index a connected network server?
Why would you want to do this?
I use Alfred instead and never use Spotlight so having it indexing my drives on connect and disconnect and once a week is annoying. Without a special use case, you wouldn’t want to do that though.
But Alfred uses Spotlights data?
just realized this. glad the command was there on how to enable it again
I am using quicksilver so spotlight isn’t needed.
I know this is off the topic, but I have tried to get Spotlight to work in Lion, and I never succeeded.
My problem is that spotlight finds items, which do not exist. If I search for a set of characters, which are almost certain not to exist on my computer, such as “h3%n9q”, Spotlight finds hundreds of files if searching by name or by content.
I re-indexed Spotlight, disabled Spotlight, re-enabled Spotlight, deleted all cashes in Lion, deleted Spotlight preference file. Did this using Spotlight preference panel or Terminal.
I once got Spotlight to work for about three days, then the same old problem was back.
Anybody else has the “find-nonexisting-items” problem?
I’ve never heard of this issue, have you tried deleting all the preferences and caches? Do you have FileVault encryption enabled? If you’ve been upgrading from Mac OS X version to Mac OS X version, there could be some legacy preferences or otherwise corrupting Spotlights index and causing it to behave like that, the solution may be to backup and reinstall Lion, as annoying as that is.
Will, thanks for your suggestions.
I do not use encryption. I did a clean install of Lion–I think because I installed over the internet as anybody else. I don’t remember if the Internet install gave me a clean install option. I always used a clean install for new systems installed from a DVD.
A wile ago I set my normal HD to be excluded, and set my backup HD for search. After indexing was complete, I had the same problem. Confirming the problem is not caused by a faulty HD. I will use another HD just to be certain, just in case the bug got copied to the backup drive.
Then I tried something else. I searched Spotlight using the terminal, e.g. mdfind h3%n9q. Works OK, no files found. Also finds files with valid search input.
I guess this means the Spotlight database is OK, and the problem is in the Spotlight interface. Strange! BTW, I get the same bad Spotlight results in searches from a window as I do searching from the Spotlight menu.
Or the Spotlight interface is connected to some phantom index.
Following up on the last idea, I did a terminal ls.
MacPro:~ Udo$ sudo du -m /.Spotlight-V100 produced this:
570 /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/308A3197-7E1D-45CE-B998-6E40C7C2CB9C
31 /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/BEDA5A58-9744-4E2D-A693-24F43A3884E7
601 /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores
601 /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1
4 /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/7D6EA8C8-E0E8-4184-85F6-39EE2B5A52B2/Cache/0000/0000/000a
7 /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/7D6EA8C8-E0E8-4184-85F6-39EE2B5A52B2/Cache/0000/0000/000b
45 /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/7D6EA8C8-E0E8-4184-85F6-39EE2B5A52B2/Cache/0000
45 /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/7D6EA8C8-E0E8-4184-85F6-39EE2B5A52B2/Cache
1 /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/7D6EA8C8-E0E8-4184-85F6-39EE2B5A52B2/journals.live
0 /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/7D6EA8C8-E0E8-4184-85F6-39EE2B5A52B2/journals.repair
0 /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/7D6EA8C8-E0E8-4184-85F6-39EE2B5A52B2/journals.scan
1049 /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/7D6EA8C8-E0E8-4184-85F6-39EE2B5A52B2
1049 /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2
1649 /.Spotlight-V100
Is this typical? What is Store V1 and Store V2?
Store V1 and Store V2 are normal part of Spotlight, they’re just metadata cache
I did try another HD, which contains only data files (no system installed). Spotlight works Ok. So, the problem is caused by something on the HD, which contains the system.
Finally solved the problem.
I had run Apple disk repair before, and it had not fixed the problem. Running it today (OS X 10.7.2) it fixed the Spotlight problem. Message was: “Updated boot support partitions for the volume as required”.
If you on SSD, there is no point of doing this. Just for the performances.
It is amazing how customizable OS X really is.
I have not needed to disable Spotlight for any reason. I would like to know why people might want to do this.
That being said – it is good to know that it can be done.
Well, I had to disable it because it would start eating up 100% of my cpu quite frequently, and was nearly impossible to stop. Once it restarted, it was back at it. It never would “finish”. This would happen a few times a week, and I can’t have that when I’m working. So I had to disable it.
Also, some people frequently use removable drives. Spotlight is stupid enough to try to index them. It just go to be too much of a pain to get to behave properly, and it has no *meaningful* controls or options. It’s basically a black box, and when it stops doing what you want your only choice is to disable it. You can’t just say “only index this volume”, or “prompt first” or “only index these folders.” I have what seems like millions of dev related files scattered around… I can’t just exclude them all, i only want to exclude some of them, but if one folder is inside another… ouch, out of luck.
But really, it was the 100% cpu and disk thrashing that finally did it for me.
I have a suggestion for the article:
You should mention that this will disable spotlight ACROSS the OS (using the search tool in a finder window won’t turn any results). Even if I am an avid Alfred user, I think that the search tool in finder windows is pretty helpful so I had to rush and re-enable spotlight to get that functionality back.
Alternatively, if you just want to remove the spotlight icon you can open terminal and type :
sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search
and then type
killall SystemUIServer
This will effectively remove the spotlight icon from the menu bar, yet you’ll keep the functionality.
[...] you are disabling Spotlight or just wanting to reduce menubar icon clutter, it’s possible to hide the Spotlight icon. [...]
[...] Via | OSXDaily [...]
[...] is a much better approach than disabling Spotlight if all you want to do is hide certain files from prying [...]
[...] that easy to do otherwise). There are a couple of terminal commands which will kill the function. How to Disable (or Enable) Spotlight in Mac OS X Lion It's a lot to type, but it worked. The alternate command is as follows: sudo mdutil -a -i off of [...]
I try your code today on lion. But with error on launchctl. Any suggestion?
[...] How to Disable (or Enable) Spotlight in Mac OS X Lion [...]
my sad had better performance specially when running intensive apps like final cut pro with indexing disable
You should know that disabling spotlight, also disables the search function in Outlook 2011…
I too used the relaunch code on Lion and it didn’t work. So be aware!
You can turn it off using info above but NOT back on. I have no idea what the correct coding is. I regret turning it off.
To turn back on in Lion use in terminal:
sudo mdutil -a -i on
Yep. Same for mountain lion.
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
doesnt work
sudo mdutil -a -i on
does
I just wanted to add that disabling Spotlight will also disable the search function in Mail. I was really scratching my head trying to figure out why Mail wasn’t finding anything in my emails, and then I remembered I had disabled Spotlight. I re-enabled it and all is well again.
Disabling spotlight messes with downloads in app store. You will [at least] no longer be able to get updates. You get a message saying:
“You have updates available for other accounts. To update this application, sign in to the account you used to purchase it.”
If you have this issue, renable spotlight server and you’ll be good.
At least it allows Time Machine to function at reasonable speed after the disastrous 10.7.5 “upgrade”
At least it allows Time Machine to function at reasonable speed after the disastrous 10.7.5 “upgrade”
Thanks for the workaround – with Spotlight disabled Time Machine is functioning normally again… Hope Apple fix the problem with 10.7.5 soon.
I can’t enable spotlight. I get the following errors when I try both approaches sams-macbook:LaunchDaemons samflower$ sudo launchctl load -w com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
launchctl: no plist was returned for: com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
launchctl: no plist was returned for: com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
nothing found to load
sams-macbook:LaunchDaemons samflower$ pwd
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons
sams-macbook:LaunchDaemons samflower$ sudo mdutil -a -i off
Spotlight server is disabled.
sams-macbook:LaunchDaemons samflower$ sudo mdutil -a -i on
Spotlight server is disabled.
Any help would be much appreciated! Its driving me mental….
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
I tried the method for disabeling my spotlight while I downloaded from another drive but when I tried to turn it back on I got this error…
launchctl: Error unloading: com.apple.metadata.mds
Any advice?
Use Onyx (free) and you can turn it off/on any time.
I’ve been disabling Spotlight for years as it always and consistently ends up running amok. Things will be okay for a while, but then out of nowhere “mdsworker” and other processes related to it will start going crazy. The HD never stops working and the searches themselves get glacial. The amount of work the process taxes the system with gets more and more ridiculous over time. The difference between a machine running Spotlight and one not running it is incredible. I really don’t care about the App Store, not while I’m still in Snow Leopard. Maybe it will be a problem when I have to go to Lion or ML someday. For now however, it can go back to the dark hell hole from whence it came.
I’ve used all the above described terminal methods to do so. However, the most fail safe method (and easiest to recover from) is using and app called Spotless. Yes, it is a GUI front end to all those commands, but it does a spectacular job of keeping me out of the terminal. That and Onyx to disable the Spotlight icon and my MacBook Pro runs so much more calmly and stably. The only thing you really lose is the App Store, which means nothing to me. I love Apple, but draconian moves like that crap hole make me wonder where the vision is coming from these days.
I couldn’t agree more, Andy. It’s interesting because I always liked these system-indexing services. For example, I just love (yes, I DO!) how Windows 7 indexes my main folders, even though I have very good control over it. Spotlight seems to depend on the weather to do its job. Works great for some, and for others, like me and you, it’s near disaster. I’d rather keep on good and old Locate/UpdateDB (recently came from Linux), most of the time my searches are for file names.
But what it’s better: even if it doesn’t come ready-made in the OS, we can choose!
Thank you all of you guys, great hint about disabling the search button and also for your opinions.
If you just want to prevent indexing on some HDs (for example, stop indexing your external and keep indexing your boot volume, for Mail search functionality, etc.) just create a new empty file at each HD’s root, named
.metadata_never_index
You can of course add your HDs to the Privacy tab of Spotlight’s Preferences but I found it doesn’t work with some HDs (eg. FAT32).
I recovered a failing partition to a new drive. It looked like most everything copied except for some garageband files. But on restarting from the new drive, spotlight wasn’t even there. So I repaired permissions, installed the 10.7.5 combo update, and ran Onyx. After restart, Spotlight icon was back, but didn’t return any results. I tried the following in Terminal:
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
To proceed, enter your password, or type Ctrl-C to abort.
Password:
com.apple.metadata.mds: Already loaded
Peters-MacBook-Pro:~ peter$ sudo mdutil -E /
Spotlight server is disabled.
Peters-MacBook-Pro:~ peter$ sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
com.apple.metadata.mds: Already loaded
Peters-MacBook-Pro:~ peter$ sudo mdutil -a -i on
Password:
Spotlight server is disabled.
Any ideas where to go from here?
mdutil(1) BSD General Commands Manual mdutil(1)
NAME
mdutil — manage the metadata stores used by Spotlight
SYNOPSIS
mdutil [-pEsav] [-i on | off] mountPoint …
DESCRIPTION
The mdutil command is useful for managing the metadata stores for mounted volumes.
The following options are available:
-p Spotlight caches indexes of some network devices locally. This option requests that a
local caches be flushed to the appropriate network device.
-E This flag will cause each local store for the volumes indicated to be erased. The stores
will be rebuilt if appropriate.
-i on | off
Sets the indexing status for the provided volumes to on or off. Note that indexing may be
delayed due to low disk space or other conditions.
-s Display the indexing status of the listed volumes.
-a Apply command to all volumes.
-v Print verbose information when available.
SEE ALSO
mdfind(1), mds(8), mdimport(1)
Mac OS X September 1, 2005 Mac OS X
(END)
Also, when I tried to to add/remove the HD from the Spotlight privacy prefpane and was told:
Privacy List Error
The item couldn’t be added or removed because you don’t have the appropriate permissions.
I’m guessing this will likely end in a clean system install, but I’m open to suggestions.
There is no file /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist
in LION ?
Why is it, when someone using Mac OS asks a perfectly valid technical operating system question, who is presumably interested in Unix/BSD security or tweaking their system for speed, battery life, stability, efficiency or whatever, on Mac forums or countless Blogs, – why is there always one who (obviously being ignorant or not interested in the technical aspects of computer operating systems themselves) decides to pipe up and type out with something unhelpful like ‘ leave it alone ‘ ‘why would you want to do something like that ‘or ‘ dont touch it ‘ ? while knowing nothing ?
This mindset is that of an ignorant smug ‘Apple fan’ who think Apple know best and let Apple do all their thinking. its smug, unhelpful, small-minded lazy thinking, zealot-like in the extreme and makes non Apple users laugh at their ignorance, while making real tech savvy people irritated beyond belief.
99% of this philistine mindset is curiously only in the Apple world, and is makes them seem foolish, most folks, while knowing little or nothing say nothing and read to learn, but ‘dont touch it’ zealots are oddly very vocal. that say an empty can rattles the loudest.. by the way Apple zealots, trust your government. stay in line. shut p and dont ask questions.
Thanks, useful. I had a corrupt file system that I could not repair because spotlight kept causing a kernel panic as soon as it tried to mount. Completely killing spotlight allowed the system to be repaired.
However, I must point-out. Your sentence “This will effect indexing on all drives connected to the Mac.” is a perfect example of the difference between affect and effect and has the oposite meaning from the one you intend. You meant all indexing will be *affected* which is the same as saying NO INDEXING will be *effected*!