mdutil

Manage the metadata stores used by Spotlight for indexing. More information: https://keith.github.io/xcode-man-pages/mdutil.1.html.

• Show the indexing status of the startup volume:

mdutil -s /

• Turn on/off the Spotlight indexing for a given volume:

mdutil -i on|off path/to/volume

• Turn on/off indexing for all volumes:

mdutil -a -i on|off

• Erase the metadata stores and restart the indexing process:

mdutil -E path/to/volume