spotlight

On occasion I need to process large volumes of text locally. Spotlight dutifully attempts to index this data, bringing my system to a crawl. Proactively disabling Spotlight is a sure way to avoid such issues and here is how to do it: Disabling Spotlight in Snow Leopard is pretty easy, launch the Terminal and type the following command: sudo mdutil -a -i off This tells the Spotlight manager to disable all indexing on all volumes, the command will require your administrative password to execute. »

From a terminal window: sudo mdutil -avE That is, sudo (because you have to have admin rights to run this), mdutil (the program that does the work for you) -a for “work on all volumes”, -v for “be verbose in telling me what you’re doing”, and -E for “erase the data store and rebuild it”. »