Tiger Tips: Hate Spotlight? Turn it off

Even easier than using CLI editors

From Terminal, this perl one-liner is all which is needed (will make a .orig backup file of the original):

sudo perl -pi'.orig' -e 's/SPOTLIGHT=-YES-/SPOTLIGHT=-NO-/' /etc/hostconfig

for those who don't want to use vi or pico, if you have TextWrangler or BBEdit (and you installed the command line tools) you can use those as well. In a Terminal window: bbedit /etc/hostconfig edit /etc/hostconfig

You can drag your hard disk or home folder into the Privacy window in Spotlight preferences to achieve a similar effect.

If this is really so easy, couldn't somebody who knows what it's all about write a little application to switch the monster on and off at will?

you know I don't see spotlight in my hostconfig list. I am scrolling down using the down arrow. the last thing in my list is VPNSERVER=-NO- and before that on the list is CORDUMPS=-NO- There are only 3 items that say YES, none of them being SPOTLIGHT, the rest say AUTOMATIC, or NO. I'm using GNU 1.2.4. Comments Please.

THANKS!!!! Worked like a charm ! I followed Tom Mango's directions and it was easy, easy easy to be rid of this crappy feature. I too was noticing a lot of slow downs AND I had times when anywhere I clicked on the screen it opened up the Spotlight window.

Worked for me! My Powerbook 1.67 is MUCH snappier now! BUT, the basic command+F Find command yields no results now, for any search...is this a byproduct of turning Spotlight off?

For the two guys/gals that had trouble not finding it, you need to use the down arrow to see the rest of the list, its second from the end on my system.

Re: above comment - Have you even tried it? That info is pretty straightforward, and the terminal is far from DOS

Uh...scuse my innocence as a NONCOMMANDLINE GURU...I'm a MAC USER you see.... So where do you get that Spotlight is supposed to show up in the terminal, I typed in vi /etc/hostconfig as well and guess what, I don't see anything but a bunch of mumbojumbo almost the same as the previous comment, and no spotlight anywhere. I'm just a simple mac user who uses google to discover how to undo any stupid things Apple does...like SPOTLIGHT. And one who's always said "if I have to use a dos-like terminal thingy to work in my computer it's not worth doing"...well you guys are proving me right here, if yer gonna give instructions about command-line crap then PLEASE give a blow by blow and don't just expect that anyone is gonna know what the heck you programmers are talking about.