[X4U] More on Spotlight

[John Baltutis]

On 05/03/05, Kirk McElhearn <kirklists at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> On May 3, 2005, at 9:32 AM, John Baltutis wrote:
>
>> Here are two detailed looks at Spotlight:
>> <http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/9> and
>> <http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-778.html>. Read both
>> because they give different perspectives.
>
> And Apple's posted a lot of interesting info here:
> http://www.apple.com/macosx/tips/spotlight.html
>

Thanks. That clears things up quite a bit.

> Now why don't they put this kind of stuff in the help... That's a
> real pita.

Because they had a release date, no matter what the state of support
documentation?

BTW, I got this from John Siracusa, author of the arstechnica article, in
response to the question- how does one go about indexing system level
directories, which are excluded by default?:

edit this file:

    % sudo emacs /.Spotlight-V100/_rules.plist

and make it look something like  this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://
www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
         <key>EXCLUDE</key>
         <array/>
         <key>INCLUDE</key>
         <array>
             <string>/private</string>
             <string>/usr</string>
         </array>
         <key>NOTE</key>
         <string>Specify paths to include or exclude, preceeding
rules which target user-homes with ~/</string>
</dict>
</plist>

...and so on, adding each directory you want to include.  Then tell
Spotlight to reindex your drive:

    % sudo mdutil -E /