I noticed that spotlight no longer "sees" Application files when I search. To remedy, I added and removed the Applications folder from the Spotlight Privacy pane. When that didn't work, I added and removed the entire hard drive with the same result.
The next steps were sudo mdutil -E / and then sudo mdutil -sa. I got the victory message after sudo mdutil -sa, but spotlight still ignores apps.
Next step?
Mac mini
For those who are still struggling with this, here's the fix. You have to execute all four commands in this order (thanks to the unnamed person who posted this way back in 2011):
sudo mdutil -i off /
sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight*
sudo mdutil -i on /
sudo mdutil -E /
In order, these accomplish:
For those who are still struggling with this, here's the fix. You have to execute all four commands in this order (thanks to the unnamed person who posted this way back in 2011):
sudo mdutil -i off /
sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight*
sudo mdutil -i on /
sudo mdutil -E /
In order, these accomplish:
This did not work (hence the original post)
Spotlight is a core technology in macOS and extremely complicated. There can be multiple possible causes for what appears to be the same problem.
I recently had an episode where I experienced the problem. In my case, had to rebuilt my computer and had copied many apps back to the computer from backup. Those apps were not indexed in Spotlight until I had launched them at least once.
So, if anyone is experiencing this problem in the future, try to manually launch the app that should be appearing in Spotlight results. See if Spotlight then behaves correctly for this one app. If so, maybe you just need to re-launch all apps to get them back into the system.
This Apple document describes hot to reindex Spotlight: How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support. If you only have the one drive, the internal boot drive, this Terminal command is easy to employ:
Enter the following command follows by the Enter or Return key:
sudo mdutil -E /
It's works only on the boot drive.
For those who are still struggling with this, here's the fix. You have to execute all four commands in this order (thanks to the unnamed person who posted this way back in 2011):
sudo mdutil -i off /
sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight*
sudo mdutil -i on /
sudo mdutil -E /
In order, these accomplish:
you can follow these steps to re-enable it:
I'm glad it worked for you. That one frustrated me for quite a while.
Use the reserved Spotlight keywords to find a specific application. The following finds InkScape as the top (sole) hit:
kind:app name:ink
But frequently sought applications should be dragged and dropped on the Dock so that you are one-click away from launching the application without needing to use Spotlight to find it.
Thanks for your reply. Yeah, that's the first document I went to when the problem popped up. sudo mdutil -E / yielded this response:
2023-07-02 13:59:19.115 mdutil[7752:469916] mdutil disabling Spotlight: / -> kMDConfigSearchLevelFSSearchOnly
Indexing disabled.
You didn't try to install Sonoma or anything did you?
I recently experienced this exact problem on my brand new computer, which I purchased, in part, to run Sonoma. So there were no 3rd party complications. Nothing but Apple software. What I had done was install both Ventura and Sonoma and I enabled FileVault on both the Sonoma and Ventura volumes. Maybe that caused it. Maybe it was just Sonoma. I don't know.
The only fix was erasing the hard drive and reinstalling Ventura. I actually had to do a DFU restore. Fun! But that fixed it.
Eric Espino wrote:
For those who are still struggling with this, here's the fix. You have to execute all four commands in this order (thanks to the unnamed person who posted this way back in 2011):
sudo mdutil -i off /
sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight*
sudo mdutil -i on /
sudo mdutil -E /
1. In order, these accomplish:
turn indexing off
2. delete Spotlight folder
3. turn indexing on
4. rebuild
You only need 2. The rest will happen automatically.
It also may fix a problem where results don’t populate for selected folder but do for This Mac.
Hi Eric, thank you so much, I tried adding and removing the application folder from privacy, I tried clean my Mac app, i tried the terminal and had no luck, fortunately, your determination to find the 2011 unnamed hero saved the day
that's a shame that this problem has not been fixed after 13 years
In my case (MacOS 14.4 Sonoma, MacBook Air M2), the Spotlight index file was at ~/.Spotlight-V100, not at /.Spotlight*. The key is the ~ tilde, a shortcut for /Users/<username>.
You can try these:
Show all 'hidden' files in your home directory. You'll probably see '.Spotlight-v100'.
ls -Fd ~/.*
Show all 'hidden' files in the root directory.
ls -Fd /.*
Show just the Spotlight file in your home directory.
ls -Fd ./Spotlight-v100
Get the size of the Spotlight index.
du -hcd 1 ~/.Spotlight-v100
I opened Activity Monitor before I started the rebuild so I could see the… Well, the activity. Click CPU and in the search box enter 'mdworker'.
So, the full rebuild recipe for me was this:
sudo mdutil -i off /
sudo rm -rf ~/.Spotlight-v100
sudo mdutil -i on /
sudo mdutil -E /
The %CPU for mdworker didn't shift much, but already some things I couldn't find before are appearing.
In my case (MacOS 14.4 Sonoma, MacBook Air M2), the Spotlight index file was at ~/.Spotlight-V100, not at /.Spotlight*. The key is the ~ tilde, a shortcut for /Users/<username>.
It shouldn't be there. Spotlight is whole-disk, not per-user.
Is Applications checked in Spotlight settings?
Spotlight indexing somehow disabled--how to re-enable?