Managing Spotlight

The long hiatus is over, and The Mac Admin is back.  Here’s a short item to get started with…

Recently, I had been experiencing some frustration as my Spotlight results weren’t including items I’d expected, such as applications when my search term was the correctly spelled application title.  The solution to this is to reset Spotlight’s cache, causing it to be rebuilt.

The command used is  mdutil.  From the man page, mdutil’s purpose is to “manage the metadata stores used by Spotlight”.  Note that mdutil requires root privileges, so sudo may be needed for this command.  I used the command below to fix my own Spotlight problems.

mdutil -E /

The -E flag erases the spotlight cache on the volume(s) specified.  In this case, only the root, or booted, volume is specified, represented by the “/” character.  By adding the “a” flag and omitting the volume specification, the command will erase the caches on all volumes, like so…

mdutil -Ea

The “i” flag can be used to turn indexing on or off for the specified volumes.  For example, let’s say I have a flash drive volume called myFlashDrive. If I want to remove the existing cache and prevent Spotlight from creating a new one, I can run the following command…

mdutil -E -i off /Volumes/myFlashDrive

I hope this is helpful.