Disable Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

On occasion I need to process large volumes of text locally. Spotlight dutifully attempts to index this data, bringing my system to a crawl. Proactively disabling Spotlight is a sure way to avoid such issues and here is how to do it: Disabling Spotlight in Snow Leopard is pretty easy, launch the Terminal and type the following command: sudo mdutil -a -i off This tells the Spotlight manager to disable all indexing on all volumes, the command will require your administrative password to execute. »