{"id":54,"date":"2007-12-03T15:23:25","date_gmt":"2007-12-03T23:23:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fox-gieg.com\/tutorials\/2007\/spotlight-cheat-sheet\/"},"modified":"2007-12-04T13:01:35","modified_gmt":"2007-12-04T21:01:35","slug":"spotlight-cheat-sheet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fox-gieg.com\/tutorials\/2007\/spotlight-cheat-sheet\/","title":{"rendered":"Spotlight Cheat Sheet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><b>Here are some useful commands for taming Spotlight<\/b>, the powerful but often irritating content indexing tool introduced with OS X Tiger.  These tips were taken from a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.macintouch.com\/tigerreview\/spotlight.html\">Macintouch<\/a> article by Robert Mohns.<\/p>\n<p>1.  Turn indexing on for a volume:<br \/>\n<code>sudo mdutil -i on \/Volumes\/VolumeName<\/code><\/p>\n<p>2.  Turn indexing off for a volume:<br \/>\n<code>sudo mdutil -i off \/Volumes\/VolumeName<\/code><\/p>\n<p>3.  Delete the index for a volume:<br \/>\n<code>sudo mdutil -E \/Volumes\/VolumeName<\/code><\/p>\n<p>4.  Force a rebuild of the index for a volume (should happen automatically following a delete):<br \/>\n<code>sudo mdimport -f \/Volumes\/VolumeName<\/code><\/p>\n<p>5.  Force a rebuild of the Mail.app index only:<br \/>\n<code>mdimport -r \/System\/Library\/Spotlight\/Mail.mdimporter<\/code><\/p>\n<p>Put the name of your target volume in place of <code>VolumeName<\/code>.  If you&#8217;re running a command on the startup volume, you only need to use a forward slash (<code>\/<\/code>).<\/p>\n<hr width=100\/>\n<p><b>There are two common scenarios where you&#8217;d want to use these commands.<\/b>  <\/p>\n<p>1.  Spotlight seems to start indexing at random.  (This isn&#8217;t normal behavior.)<br \/>\nDelete the index for the startup volume; it&#8217;s probably corrupt.  It should rebuild itself after:<br \/>\n<code>sudo mdutil -E \/<\/code><\/p>\n<p>2.  Spotlight insists on indexing external drives each time they&#8217;re mounted.  (This is normal behavior, but it&#8217;s annoying.)<br \/>\nUsing the command line, turn off indexing for each external drive:<br \/>\n<code>sudo mdutil -i off \/Volumes\/VolumeName<\/code><\/p>\n<hr width=100\/>\n<p><b>If you&#8217;d just like to turn Spotlight off entirely<\/b>, without having to type commands, you can use the <a href=\"http:\/\/d-t-f.sourceforge.net\/\">Disable Tiger Features<\/a> utility.  Be warned that, while old-fashioned filename search still works without Spotlight, there are some odd side effects&#8211;for instance, you can no longer search for text in the body of emails using Mail.app.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here are some useful commands for taming Spotlight, the powerful but often irritating content indexing tool introduced with OS X Tiger. These tips were taken from a Macintouch article by Robert Mohns. 1. Turn indexing on for a volume: sudo mdutil -i on \/Volumes\/VolumeName 2. Turn indexing off for a volume: sudo mdutil -i off [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fox-gieg.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fox-gieg.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fox-gieg.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fox-gieg.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fox-gieg.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fox-gieg.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fox-gieg.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fox-gieg.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fox-gieg.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}