HOWTO Disable spotlight

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So you don't use Spotlight much and don't like it churning your hard drive or sucking battery life? Well lets see what we can do about Disabling spotlight.

Solution

Edit /etc/hostconfig and find the following line 

SPOTLIGHT=-YES-

and change it to 

SPOTLIGHT=-NO-

Then to get rid of the existing index, run these two commands from Terminal: 

sudo mdutil -i off /
sudo mdutil -E /

The first command disables indexing on the boot volume, and the second erases the existing template.

REBOOT!

Re-enabling spotlight

If you later change your mind and decide you want Spotlight after all, it's easy to reactivate. Set 

SPOTLIGHT=-YES-

in /etc/hostconfig, run in Terminal: 

sudo mdutil -i on /

and reboot.

External Links

  • MacOSXHints Article - This info in this wikitechia entry was taken from jjccgg's comment to the article.
Retrieved from "http://www.wikitechia.org/wiki/HOWTO_Disable_spotlight"
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