searchdiagnose —
gathers information to aid in diagnosing Spotlight and
Search issues
The searchdiagnose tool gathers system and
Spotlight information in order to assist Apple when investigating issues
related to Spotlight and Search. A great deal of information is harvested,
spanning system state, system and Spotlight details.
- A spindump(8) of the system
- Several seconds of top(1) output
- Paths for all files used by Spotlight to contain its database on every
volume
- All system logs
- sample(1), heap(1), and
spindump(8) of the following processes:
- mds(8)
- mds_stores
- mdsync
- corespotlightd
- Spotlight
- Spin and crash reports for the following processes, for all local users:
- The query text and result quality statistics for recent Spotlight
searches. The actual results of the searches are not gathered
- General information about disks and mounted network shares
- The path of the last file indexed by each mdworker process on behalf of
Spotlight. The path of the last file which resulted in a crash of an
mdworker process. In each case, only the path is gathered, not the
contents of the file
- Spotlight configuration for each volume currently mounted on your system.
This includes the path and size of all files used internally by Spotlight
as well as a listing of paths that are user excluded from indexing
- Comprehensive information about internal state of Spotlight
- No user data is harvested from any volume
- No paths or files found by any search are returned
- No database storage or user files are returned
- No authentication credentials are harvested from the system
searchdiagnose exits with status 0 if
there were no internal errors encountered during the diagnostic, or >0
when an error unrelated to external state occurs or unusable input is
provided by the user.