How To FULLY Disable Spotlight in Leopard
Warning: This is changing system settings that may or may not be attached to other tools. After an extensive search on the internet, one of these tools affected by the following steps is TimeMachine / TimeCapsule. If you are using them, I would not follow these steps. Rule of thumb: if you think it will mess up your system and you don’t want to worry about that, don’t do it.
Quick way
Disable
sudo launchctl unload -w "/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist"
sudo launchctl unload -w "/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist"
Re-enable
sudo launchctl load -w "/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist"
sudo launchctl load -w "/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist"
Explanation
Stop and disable the background server
Kill the Daemon
sudo launchctl unload -w "/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist"
Re-enable the Daemon
sudo launchctl load -w "/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist"
Stop and disable the spotlight application itself
Kill the Agent
sudo launchctl unload -w "/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist"
Re-enable the Agent
sudo launchctl load -w "/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist"
You may get an error on the last command; just ignore it.
What it does
We stop the process from running and tell the system to fully disable it.
sudo launchctl unload -w "/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist"
Now we need to stop the agent for the user and everyone else.
sudo launchctl unload -w "/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist"
The re-enable Spotlight back again
If you need to re-enable the process, you can run the following line.
sudo launchctl load -w "/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist"
The following line re-enable the Spotlight agent.
sudo launchctl load -w "/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist"
The reason you get the error is that you are effectively executing the command as root, but the root user hasn’t any running instance of Spotlight. On the other hand, only the root user is able to disable the automatic start of Spotlight. Thus the need for the sudo command.
Done!
There’s no need to reboot your computer after following these steps.