Reindexing Spotlight on OSX

28/06/14 15:02 Filed in: Apple

how do you re-do your spotlight index if it goes a bit screwy?

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What on earth has been going on lately? In the last couple of weeks I’ve had about 8 people ask me how to rebuild their Spotlight indexes in OSX Mavericks as it’s gone a bit crazy, and not picking up apps. The most common query – can’t find TextEdit in Spotlight.

Anyway, rebuilding your Spotlight index is pretty easy. Fire up terminal, and use this command:

Sudo mdutil –E /

You’ll be asked for your admin password, and then off it will go and reindex.

Now, if your normal user account isn’t an admin (Go you for doing things properly!) you can run Terminal as a different user. See here for details on how to do that.

Running Terminal As a Different User

MAC

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Reindexing Spotlight on OSX