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

  • 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... :|
  • 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.
  • Justin
    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.
  • Jay
    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.
  • Dg
    That file shouldn't be zero length - on my system it's a 740k file. Want a copy back?
  • Kill the cancer that is Spotlight.

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