How to tell if Spotlight is indexing on Sonoma

Then it may be already indexed and for small quanta of file changes, the indexing occurs too rapidly for you to detect it.

If Spotlight is indexing, there will be a flurry of mdworker* processes running and you can determine that count with the following in the Terminal command line:

ps -ceo command | grep -c mdworker

OK, so after two or three hours of trying every single thing that the internet (and helpful people on this board) can come up with - nothing whatsoever worked - until I found this page: Dr Buho / how to / rebuild spotlight index. The master stroke was his 'tip': "If your Spotlight still isn't functioning correctly after following these steps, it may be due to a corrupted Spotlight directory. In this case, please run the command mdutil -X after step 4, and then proceed with step 5 to ensure that the index rebuild starts from scratch."

Obviously don't try this without following his instructions on his website.

And now the magical 'indexing' progress bar is in Spotlight. Alleluia.

Again, how can I 100% force the Mac to re-index? Does anyone know? Thanks.

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support

sudo mdutil -E /

Delete the .Spotlight-v100 folder on the drive. In Sonoma, it is on the Data volume which is mounted at /System/Volumes/Data

None of those will resolve any data corruption or system modifications that are interfering with the indexing.

Note: Any undownloaded cloud files can only be searched by Name. You will not find any undownloaded files when searching for content.

creativepassion wrote:

In the old days, you could see how long indexing was taking by hovering over Spotlight in the top menu. But this no longer works. I couldn't find any recent answers.

Is it possible that the process "mds_stores" (if you search Activity Monitor > CPU and sort by greatest %CPU) is showing me that it's still going?

Any way better way to know if it's still reindexing or how long it's going to take?

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/8d841a4e-eba4-42c0-b03a-037c20bbbc9c

You can see it if you do a search...for basically anything— it will show you were it is at on the progress bar

I have tried every single method of trying to get my Macbook Pro M1 Pro OS 14.4.1 to re-index and it just will not do it (Terminal commands & also excluding then including drives in Spotlight). Nothing works. The indexing progress bar does not appear when I use Spotlight... any ideas anyone please?

Thanks - but... as I said: it isn't working... I have a files that are not being found... so it is not 'already indexed'.

When I use the command that you said "ps -ceo command | grep -c mdworker" it returns the number "4".

Again, how can I 100% force the Mac to re-index? Does anyone know? Thanks.

... BUT this still doesn't index my external drive! And I can't find the Spotlight index for that drive... why is this so difficult?

What doesn't? Did you run the command passing the external drive path? That would have removed the Spotlight folder and according to the manual page, it won't be evaluated again until you unmount and remount the drive or specifically enable indexing on the drive.

I've never found it difficult to enable showing of hidden files. They made it easier some time ago by adding the cmd-shift-. shortcut so you can view some of them directly in Finder.

How is the drive formatted? Perhaps it cannot be indexed by Spotlight. If it is possible to index the drive, even if you exclude it, there will be a .Spotlight-v100 folder at the root level the drive.

... BUT this still doesn't index my external drive! And I can't find the Spotlight index for that drive... why is this so difficult?