There are many ways to disable Spotlight. I don't remember which combination worked for me, but the end result is that mdutil doesn't run on this machine anymore, and my menu bar is devoid of a Spotlight icon. (Also I disabled Quick Look, since its indexing also caused problems.)

But I still want to search my files. My solution was to create an automated job that runs once a day, and saves the path of every file into a big text document. Then I created a little command-line alias called search, which prints any file paths that match a search term. Here's how to do it:

First things first... We need a script that will traverse the file system, and save the path of every file into a massive text document. This is pretty easy, the find utility can do the heavy lifting. Here's the script I wrote:

#!/bin/bash
rm /Users/chaz/dev/search/tree.txt
find / > /Users/chaz/dev/search/tree.txt

I saved this script as /Users/chaz/dev/search/build_tree.sh . Make sure it's executable, then run it:

$ chmod a+x build_tree.sh
$ ./build_tree.sh

The first time through, the rm command will complain that it has no tree.txt to delete, but that's okay. find will throw some other warnings at you: it can't traverse every directory because it doesn't have permission. Again, that's okay -- I probably won't be hunting for files in such places.

Grab a beverage, this process takes a few minutes. When it's done, you'll have a (rather large) tree.txt file in the directory. How large, exactly?

$ wc tree.txt
1719365 5761267 196118611 tree.txt

1,719,365 lines, so I just indexed 1,719,365 files. Awesome.

It would be nice if the indexing ran automatically, preferably when I'm asleep. Since cron is being phased out of OS X Leopard, we'll use launchd instead. I created this file, called rebuild_search_tree.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://ww w.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>chaz.search.tree.rebuild</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/Users/chaz/dev/search/build_tree.sh</string>
<string>daily</string>
</array>
<key>LowPriorityIO</key>
<true/>
<key>Nice</key>
<integer>1</integer>
<key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
<dict>
<key>Hour</key>
<integer>6</integer>
<key>Minute</key>
<integer>15</integer>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

Save this into ~/Library/LaunchAgents . You may have to create that directory, and there's an added wrinkle: for both the LaunchAgents directory and the .plist file, the owner has to be root.

$ sudo chown -R root ~/Library/LaunchAgents

Register this script with launchctl:

$ sudo launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/rebuild_search_tree.plist

Now this launch agent will run automatically at 6:15 every morning.

Finally, we need a command-line tool to search the tree. I added this line to my .profile:

function search() { clear; cat /Users/chaz/dev/search/tree.txt | grep "$@" | more; }

And here's how you use it:

$ search test
/Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS3/MATLAB/tests/teststats.m
/Applications/Audacity folder/nyquist/test.lsp
/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resources/da.lproj/iTunes Help/gfx/gfx_test.gif
...

For each file that matches your query, it displays the full path of the file. This could be made fancier, but for now this is all I need!

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