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Spotlight -


Actually I use HoudahSpot and prefer that but it does rely on Spotlight's indexing - not sure why but the Spotlight index either was deleted or corrupted or whatever. Is there a way to tell whether it's rebuilding or to force its rebuild? To see the status of the re-indexing???


Am on Mojave

iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 10.14

Posted on Jul 10, 2021 8:26 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jul 10, 2021 9:17 AM

Hello,


Yes, you can force Spotlight to re-index your Mac.


Please see this support doc–

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716

4 replies

Jul 10, 2021 1:33 PM in response to Victoria Herring

Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode? Could take 10 minutes.


Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches & loads safe Drivers, & prevents loading of 3rd party extensions, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.


Open Terminal and run each of these...


sudo mdutil -E /


This basically asks for temporary super user status, which is why Terminal may ask you for your password (it may not if you’ve used a sudo command recently or are already logged in as a super user or root. The command asks the unix tool mdutil to reindex the spotlight database for everything on the computer, including external drives, mounted disk images, etc. To re-index only for a specific drive, use the /Volumes path. For example, for an external drive named “MiniMe,” the command would look like this:


sudo mdutil -i on /


Rebuilding a drive index can take a long time, so be prepared to wait whether you do it through the System Preference panel or the command line. A few minutes normally.

Spotlight -

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