How can I force Spotlight to index /users/shared folder

It should be automatic?

I keep my iTunes in /Users/Shared and it is indexed completely in Leopard. Try dragging the folder into the System Prefs->Spotlight->Privacy pane, wait a minute and then remove it and see if Spotlight begins indexing it. You should hear the hard drive access rev up or look in Activity Monitor and check to see if mds and mdimport start running enthusiastically.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

Did you by any chance copy your stuff in the Shared folder from your Tiger install? I ran into a Spotlight indexing problem due to an Ownerhip/Group issue between Leopard and Tiger. Leopard would not index some of own files because the Group was "unknown." This is because Tiger had this:

owner:francine (UID 501)
group:francine (GID 501)

No other 'NIX system has such a group, and neither did OS X initially, don't remember when Apple introduced this weird group, but they decided to drop it with Leopard. So Leopard does not recognize the group, and decides it is "unknown" (GID 99). When you create your account in Leopard you are assigned the standard 'NIX group of Staff (GID 20). The problem I ran into was that Spotlight was not indexing most of my own files in the home folder. When I changed them all to group:staff it kicked into gear and did the indexing.

So do a GetInfo on your things in the Shared folder, and in the bottom section, Sharing & Permissions, check that the first one is you, with Read&Write, and the second one is staff, with Read. If the second one is (unknown) that may be the source of the problem. Anyway, it was for me.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

I'm afraid we are really getting in over my head on this one! I have only VERY rudimentary knowledge about UNIX owners/groups/permissions, and have just started to learn a very tiny bit about ACLs (in fact I was just now talking to my UNIX guru brother about ACLs, just trying to get a very basic definition that I could grasp).

The wheel group is a very privileged group, root belongs to it for instance. If you take look at any system files you'll notice they belong to group wheel. Evidently in earlier incarnations of Mac OS X the admin of the computer belongs to group wheel, that appeard not to be the case any more. My admin account here in Leopard is definitely NOT a member of wheel. The fact that those files are may indeed be the problem--just as the fact that my files were assigned to the unknown group rather than staff turned out to be my problem. However, the fact that you did some dinking around with the ACLs may complicate things. I just don't know.

While I used the old BatChmod program to change mine, you could try using the Terminal. I think the Terminal command would be:

chgrp -R 20 /Users/Shared/nameoffolder

But before you do that, try checking with the Mac UNIX gurus here:

http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=735

Explain what the problem is and ask if the above is the appropriate command, and if it can cause any unexpected problems, especially since you added special ACLs to things. I just don't know how all of that works.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

I had a problem getting my iTunes music folder to index. No matter how I tried searches wouldn't come up with anything. Here's how I got it to work:

- The problem in my case was after doing a "Get Info" (Cmd-I) of that folder, I found that while myself as a user had read/write permissions, others have neither read or write permissions. I changed that to "read" for others.

It seemed to re-index and then all searches for songs showed up again in "Find" and Spotlight.

-To force an index of this (if for some reason it would not), go to System Preferences -> Spotlight and click on the Privacy tab. Now drag the folder that would not index to this area. It should appear in this pane. Leave it there for a minute. Then select the folder in the Privacy pane and click "-" (minus sign) to remove it. The folder (or drive) will re-index +after you remove it.+

Voila! You should have your file searching abilities back for that folder or drive.