Spotlight hardcoded exclusions

10 May 2005

I've been trying to play with the new Certificate Assistant that comes with Tiger to set up a CA but had some trouble tracking it down in the System Preferences. So I figured I'd search for it using spotlight but could not find it.

Turns out it is on the drive in /System/Library/CoreServices/Certificate Assistant.app so why did it not show up in Spotlight? Annoyingly I found out that there is a hard coded list of directories that Spotlight will exclude, this include all of /private which contains among others /etc and a whole long list of other stuff that Unix people might actually enjoy being able to find.

If you'd like to override these defaults then read this discussion board entry for all the details.

Spotlight is becoming more a pain than it's worth, I have considered just turning it off since it seems daily I discover a new way that it is somehow crippled in the name of sparing the poor clueless masses from seeing something they aren't supposed to see etc.

Posted by R.I.Pienaar on Tuesday, May 10, 2005 at 9:10 PM

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