As the man page for mdutil
states; bold emphasis is mine:
The mdutil
command is useful for managing the metadata stores for
mounted volumes.
So when you ask:
Can you run mdutil
on some arbitrary folder in your system and it will
index recursively all subfolders, and nothing else on your system?
Nope since mdutil
is not a folder-based metadata storage tool, but rather a volume-based metadata storage tool.
Then you say:
What is the -E
option? It seems to me that it means something like
"reindex" however the following bash command does not make sense to me
mdutil -E -i off /
.
The -E
option in the man page is described as:
This flag will cause each local store for the volumes indicated to be
erased. The stores will be rebuilt if appropriate.
So the -E
option simply erases a metadata store on a specified volume. And in the case of this example:
mdutil -E -i off /
That command will erase (via the -E
option) the metadata store on the volume mounted at root (/
) and then set then turn off the indexing status (via the -i off
option) on the volume mounted at root (/
) as well.
Your confusion might come from the fact that /
doesn’t seem like an explicit volume name but rather a path. But that /
does indicate the root volume of the booted OS you are running that command on.
For example, let’s look at the output for ls -la /Volumes/
on an example Mac OS X system. It might look something like this:
drwxrwxrwt@ 7 root admin 238 Sep 3 19:48 .
drwxr-xr-x 29 root wheel 1054 Sep 3 01:40 ..
-rw-r--r--@ 1 jack admin 6148 May 18 18:57 .DS_Store
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Sep 3 10:17 Hard Drive -> /
Note how Hard Drive
is not actually a “real” mounted volume as much as it is a symbolic link to the /
mounted volume on the file system. The true mounted volume name is /
.
So knowing that /
and Hard Drive
both point to the same mounted volume this command using the full /Volumes/
name:
mdutil -E -i off /Volumes/Hard\ Drive/
Is effectively the same command as this on the same Mac OS X system:
mdutil -E -i off /
1Thank you. You are right part of my confusion is muddling the idea of paths, mounted volumes, and the "Hard Drive". And its obvious that E eases the metadata... Idk why I was confused XD. – user2522073 – 2015-09-04T00:31:49.237
@user2522073 It’s fair enough you were confused since Linux/Unix filesystems can be so simple they are daunting to new users. Live and learn! – JakeGould – 2015-09-04T02:06:20.363