How can I force Spotlight to reindex a folder?

Hello:

This article explains how to force Spotlight to reindex.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2409

Barry

Hello:

Not that I am aware of..... 😟

Barry

Open Terminal in Applications>Utilities and copy/paste, then hit return.

sudo mdutil -E /

You will be warned about using the sudo command, then give your password, which you will not see on the screen as you type it. Then hit return. You will get a message "indexing enabled." Type in exit, hit return, close the window and quit Terminal. Your drive will be reindexed. This will take some time.

Try using mdutil in terminal to erase the spotlight data and force reindexing. In terminal type or cut/paste the following line replacing volume with the path to the diskname:

sudo mdutil -E volume

For example,

sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/foo

sudo mdutil -E /

sudo mdutil -E /

It does reIndex. But it still doesnt indexing my external drives

and the

sudo mdutil -E /external hdd path

return an error ivalid path

anybody? 😮

Thank you! I needed to reindex after using migration assistant to move my files to a new MPB. This solved my problem!

However, I know exactly which folder hast to be reindexed. Can i somehow specify this in order to avoid a reindexing of the whole HDD?

I tried sudo mdutil -E /Users/Documents but it says, no index available...

Best Regards,

PP

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2409 says under Products Affected: Mac OS X 10.4, Mac OS X 10.5...

However, it did not work for me neither.

The reason for that is that because you have to specify the user that you want to remove the index of the Documents folder for, even if you're the only user. So the path that you would have to enter is /Users/your user name/Documents. If you're unsure of what your user name is, you can type in ls /Users to list all of the user names on your computer.

Doesn't make a difference to me:

ben% sudo mdutil -E /Users/ben/Documents/

/Users/ben/Documents:

No index.

I guess OSX 10.7 does create one Index for the whole HDD, which is not that easy to manipulate.

However, many thanks for the reply

Yeah, it does seem to be the case after reading the man file for it: "The mdutil command is useful for managing the metadata stores for mounted volumes."

Thank you. This worked!

... it says "Indexing disabled" ... do I really want that?