Mac OS X: Enable and Disable Spotlight

To Disable Spotlight for Mac OS X you can stop the Spotlight processes from being invoked by launchd.  To do so use the following commands:

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

To re-enable it you would simply load up your launchd processes again like so:

launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist

launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

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Posted on November 23, 2008 by . This entry was posted in Mac OS X, Xsan and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

2 Comments

  • Cedric Tineo
    November 9, 2010 - 9:27 am | Permalink

    nice to know – but your command shows up as :

    launchctl unload -w … the  got to be a mistake or an encoding odity… is it supposed to be just -w ?

    • Charles
      June 18, 2012 - 9:15 pm | Permalink

      Yes, there was an extraneous  in there but it’s fixed now.

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