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One response to “How To Disable Spotlight on MacOS X”

1. 2006/05/01

   alecm

   Spotlight

   in case the beb page goes away …

   The first step is to become root. You can do everything with “sudo”, but we have a few steps here, so it’s easiest to start with “sudo su -“. Give your ordinary password, and you have a root prompt.

   To disable Spotlight from starting up at boot, edit /etc/hostconfig and change the Spotlight line:

   SPOTLIGHT=-NO-

   For each disk drive, turn off Spotlight indexing:

   mdutil -i off /

   mdutil -i off /myotherdrive

   Note that you’ll see errors if the disk is very busy when you do that. Wait till the disk activity stops and try again.

   Then run:

   mdutil -E /

   mdutil -E /myotherdrive

   If there’s any “mdimport” running in Activity Monitor or ps, kill it.

   This gets rid of the index, but doesn’t remove the .Spotlight directory, so:

   cd /

   rm -rf .Spotlight*

   cd /myotherdrive

   rm -rf .Spotlight*

   Reboot after all this and you shouldn’t be bothered by Spotlight again.

   Some web sites have suggested using the System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy tab but apparently that can cause other problems.

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