Reenabling the Spotlight Menubar item in Mac OS X 10.6

I believe I followed the instructions here to disable Spotlight indexing and remove the menubar item.

I reenabled indexing just fine, but when I changed the permissions back to 744, the spotlight search position came back (as in the space it would normally occupy), but the actual icon and search box will not show up. If I click that portion of the screen I get a blue box, but I can't type anything in to anything.

Currently, permissions look like this:

[~]$ ll /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle.bak/Contents/MacOS/
total 648
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   835K Sep 17 14:48 Search*

ll is an alias mapped to the following

alias ll='${LS_PREAMBLE} -hl'

with $LS_PREAMBLE

[~]$ echo $LS_PREAMBLE
ls -GF

(Ignore the .bak extension. I decided that until I found a way to fully restore it, I would just remove it entirely following the directions here)

That looks right to me and obviously something is launching, but the UI elements aren't there.

So how can I restore it?

Thanks in advance!

Tim Visher

Posted 2010-11-25T02:36:24.277

Reputation: 552

Answers

Spotlight.icns should be in the Resources directory of Search.bundle/Contents.

If you're experiencing difficulties with the UI not showing up, perhaps you should check that the Resources directory exists at all!

Luckily I was able to find a copy of the Resources directory and place it back in the proper location. Everything appears fine now.

Tim Visher

Posted 2010-11-25T02:36:24.277

Reputation: 552

Interesting. The patch brought back the Search.bundle, but not all its contents -- I only got a nib file in the Spanish locale in Resources. That's why it works only partially -- the bundle is there, but no resources. – Daniel Beck – 2011-01-26T14:33:56.743

Is that really your ls output? Because that file should be Search, not Search*.

Once everything in the filesystem is back to the way it should be, I might just try restarting for kicks, and a permissions repair.

If all else fails, try restoring Search.bundle from backup.

NReilingh

Posted 2010-11-25T02:36:24.277

Reputation: 5 539

The asterisk at the end is most likely from the -F option to ls. It just indicates that this is an executable file -- which the permissions also show. – Doug Harris – 2010-11-25T13:38:16.557

It is indeed my ls output. I'll try repairing permissions. – Tim Visher – 2010-11-25T14:50:52.423

On further review, I appear to be missing Spotlight.icns from my System! I'm running a sudo find / -name "Spolight.icns" as I write, but Spotlight itself turns up nothing. Where should I be looking for the Icon file and how could I go about restoring it if it's indeed missing? – Tim Visher – 2011-01-26T12:52:48.533