Using Terminal to stop indexing for Spotlight

bkengland wrote:
Thanks for that information. Is there a way to issue the command such that it applies to all drives? (e.g., with a wildcard entry)

you can do

sudo mdutil -i off /volumes/*

this will turn off spotlight on all currently mounted drives. however it will not affect new drives you mount later.

As far as troubleshooting Spotlight, can you suggest a good reference source for me to use? For example, what events can trigger the indexing process, and what occurs during indexing, stage by stage?

see these pages for some info
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/MetadataIntro/Metadat aIntro.html

what exactly is happening in your case? sometimes reindexing a drive is all that's needed. add it for about 10 seconds to the privacy pane in spotlight systme preferences and then remove it from there. this will reindex the drive.

Bye for now!
Bruce

Message was edited by: V.K.

Message was edited by: V.K.

you have to supply that terminal command with a path to the volume where you want to turn off indexing. to turn it off on your startup drive use

sudo mdutil -i off /

for other drives it would be

sudo mdutil -i off /volumes/"drive name"

But I would suggest you try to figure out your problems with spotlight. it should normally consume very few resources and should not "kick in at very inconvenient times".