Whether it’s an Xsan with a wacky mdworker thread, a regular old box trying to scan a whole bunch of files you want it to skip or even a directory that you want to keep private, you can tell Spotlight not to scan a specified folder on your system. Simply use the following command, with the working directory of the shell as whatever directory you want skipped: touch .metadata_never_index In other words, create a file called .metadata_never_index in a folder and Spotlight will skip it. This isn’t to say it skips subfolders…