What the heck are you doing Spotlight?

Filed Under Apple on 2008-04-20, 14:52

I don’t use Spotlight at all thanks to Quicksilver. But I’ve noticed in my system.log that I’m getting the following messages over and over again:

Apr 20 14:44:40 egads com.apple.launchd[102] (com.apple.Spotlight[4906]): posix_spawnp(“/System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotlight”, …): No such file or directory
Apr 20 14:44:40 egads com.apple.launchd[102] (com.apple.Spotlight[4906]): Exited with exit code: 1

Anyone have any idea what’s happening here? I looked at “/System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotlight” and it has no size, so I’m guessing it’s leftover from something? Anyone have any insight?

Update:
hmmm weird.. When I check the file through a console I have:
sh-3.2# pwd
/System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS
sh-3.2# ls -l
total 1384
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 704720 Feb 5 22:30 Spotlight

But if I browse to it in the Finder, I see Spotlight (I’m assuming that’s Spotlight.app) with a zero KB size. If I try to open it it says it’s not supported in this architecture.

So confused.

SOLVED! Kudos go to Justin for hooking me up with the full copy of Spotlight.app. I backed up the old (apparently corrupt) one and the copied the new Spotlight.app from him into /System/Library/CoreServices. So far, so good and no more errors in system.log. Woohoo!

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Comments

View Comments to “What the heck are you doing Spotlight?”

  1. Rubin110 on April 20th, 2008 2:55 pm
  2. Rubin110 on April 20th, 2008 5:55 pm

    Kill the cancer that is Spotlight.

    http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20...

  3. Dg on April 21st, 2008 6:08 pm

    That file shouldn’t be zero length – on my system it’s a 740k file. Want a copy back?

  4. Dg on April 21st, 2008 9:08 pm

    That file shouldn't be zero length – on my system it's a 740k file. Want a copy back?

  5. Jay on April 21st, 2008 9:55 pm

    Same deal here. Tried disabling spotlight a while ago, then re-enabling. It’s been all messed up since then (course, it was eating up CPU cycles more frequently than I cared, so IMHO was messed up before I played with it). Don’t play with Spotlight kids.

  6. Jay on April 22nd, 2008 12:55 am

    Same deal here. Tried disabling spotlight a while ago, then re-enabling. It's been all messed up since then (course, it was eating up CPU cycles more frequently than I cared, so IMHO was messed up before I played with it). Don't play with Spotlight kids.

  7. Justin on April 22nd, 2008 7:19 pm

    Disabling spotlight is a terrible idea.

    Good lord. It’s the system wide file watching agent and integrated search function. I use the “search” function in the Finder maybe once a week but you _need_ it to be functional.

  8. Justin on April 22nd, 2008 10:19 pm

    Disabling spotlight is a terrible idea.

    Good lord. It's the system wide file watching agent and integrated search function. I use the “search” function in the Finder maybe once a week but you _need_ it to be functional.

  9. Jake on June 19th, 2008 1:20 pm

    Hi. I’m having the same problem with my Spotlight. Do you think you could send me a working copy of the program? If included my email address, so you can just email it to me. Thanks a lot.

  10. Jake on June 19th, 2008 4:20 pm

    Hi. I'm having the same problem with my Spotlight. Do you think you could send me a working copy of the program? If included my email address, so you can just email it to me. Thanks a lot.

  11. levifig on September 23rd, 2008 9:36 pm

    BTW, had the same problem, googled, found this article, replaced my Spotlight.app with the one from a previous Time Machine backup (actually from before I formatted and re-installed OSX 2 days ago) and now it seems to be working…

    Kinda weird, if you ask me… :|

  12. levifig on September 23rd, 2008 5:36 pm

    BTW, had the same problem, googled, found this article, replaced my Spotlight.app with the one from a previous Time Machine backup (actually from before I formatted and re-installed OSX 2 days ago) and now it seems to be working…

    Kinda weird, if you ask me… :|

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