Disabling Spotlight in Leopard
If, like me, you disabled Spotlight under Mac OS X 10.4 but have since upgraded to 10.5, you've probably noticed that the upgrade process re-enables it. However, the procedure for disabling Spotlight under Tiger no longer works. Here's how to disable Spotlight and its helpers under Leopard.
You have to change two launchd plist files:
- /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist
- /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
Add the following key to each of them:
<key>Disabled</key>
<true/>
After that, reboot, and there should no longer be any Spotlight or mds processes. At that point, you can also remove Spotlight's data store:
$ cd / $ sudo rm -rf .Spotlight*
If you ever want to re-enable Spotlight, just remove the Disabled keys, then either reboot or reload the plist files with launchctl.
Update: Technipages has posted a slightly simpler procedure that uses only launchctl.
Tags: apple
Mon, 05 Nov 2007 23:45 UTC