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Repair broken full-message search in Mail
Authored by: kyngchaos on Feb 08, '08 09:30:36AM

Sometimes, on Leopard at least, Spotlight gets disabled with ".metadata_never_index". I haven't figured out why, it just happens. Using mdutil to turn Spotlight on for a disk doesn't work then.

You may need to delete this file on the disk's root:

sudo rm /.metadata_never_index

Then turn on Spotlight with mdutil.



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Repair broken full-message search in Mail
Authored by: kyngchaos on Feb 08, '08 09:44:47AM

Oh yeah, prefix the path with the correct "/Volumes/disk_name" as used in the original hint, if it's not the boot disk.



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Repair broken full-message search in Mail
Authored by: joshturse on Feb 09, '08 05:51:18PM
When I type in "sudo mdutil -i on /", the reply from the terminal is
/:

Indexing disabled.

That doesn't (didn't) seem right, so I "sudo rm /.metadata_never_index" and tried again, with the same response. Is this what I'm supposed to see?

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Repair broken full-message search in Mail
Authored by: barthex on Feb 12, '08 02:11:30AM

Anything that start with "sudo" and is followed by "rm" is the equivalent of letting your three year-old kid fumble with a loaded gun.

Adding "/" after is the equivalent of showing him the trigger.

He might not hurt himself, he might not hurt you, but he COULD hurt anyone.

Please do no play with "sudo rm" unless you understand what it could do.
It is a command that will delete in a non-recuperable way the files that are concerned (and "/" attacks the top level of your disk. Shiny.)

I wish comments were subject to filtering when the "sudo rm" string appears!

Just a word of caution, not a scorn on unix beginners (I am one meself, and that is a quite importanrt lesson I was glad to be given)



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