Delete the current index

To delete the Spotlight index, open up the Terminal app and type in the following:

sudo rm -r /.Spotlight-V<tab>

Note: Do not type in the <tab> part. That is to force the Terminal app to load whatever your index folder is into the command.

How to make Spotlight reindex your file system

To force Spotlight to reindex your file system, use the Terminal app to run the following commands:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
sudo mdutil -E /

Give it some time to reindex your file system. You’ll notice the processors working hard during this time. Depending on the amount of file on your system, this may take a few minutes or an hour or two.

Now, the full story…

When I first purchased my iPhone 3GS, one of the features I looked forward to use the most was the new Voice Control feature. I had owned the iPhone 3G and originally thought this feature was going to be part of the iPhone OS 3.0 upgrade but it was not. You have to have the latest hardware in the iPhone 3GS in order to use this feature.

When I first got my iPhone 3GS activated and ready to use, I went to use the Voice Control feature and unlike most every other iPhone feature, the Voice Control feature was not obvious. I’ve never had to pick up an iPhone manual to figure out a feature and I wasn’t going to start now. So I thought about it for a minute and realized the point of the feature is to be able to take an action in a hands free mode. The only real way to do this would be if you could trigger it without unlocking the phone. So I looked and there are only two real buttons on the phone. I figured it wasn’t going to be the power button so it had to be the home button. Sure enough, if you hold down the Home button for a couple seconds, the phone will make a unique tone sound and vibrate. This lets you know you can speak the voice command without having to even look at the phone.

This is a great new feature to the iPhone and one that I welcome. It allows you to have a true “eyes free” experience with the iPhone. The extension of the voice commands into the iPod controls is also great. Just another example of the iPhone leading the way in mobile devices.

dscacheutil -flushcache

The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs. Clients with link editing capabilities ought to automatically re-link references to the Request-URI to one or more of the new references returned by the server, where possible. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise.

The new permanent URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s).

If the 301 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued.
W3C Hypertext Transfer Protocol

This is particularly useful for search engines like Google, which will carry over page rank to the new page if this status code is seen. If you do not need to indicate permanent displacement, you can accomplish redirection by setting a Location header in PHP. The location header does the actual redirection to the new location, and can be used by itself.

If you set the Location header by itself, PHP automatically sets the status code to HTTP/1.1 302 Found.

Note, if you attempt to send headers after content has been sent, you will get a warning like, “Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by …”. Watch out for empty lines and spaces between PHP open and close tags.

Here is the code to do this in PHP…

<?php
// Permanent redirection
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.example.com/");
exit();
?>

Just make sure you put these lines in your page before any other content is sent out. The http://www.example.com/ part can be changed to whatever the new address for this resource is.

The only problem is that each device OS has a different location to find this serial number. This article explains how to find the serial number in your iPhone device. It will also work for the iPhone 3G since they use the same operating system. And it should also work the same for the iPod Touch.

1. From the main screen on your iPhone/iPod Touch, tap the “Settings” icon.
2. On the Settings screen, tap the General section.
3. Now tap the About section.
4. Scroll down a ways and you will see an item for “Serial Number”. That’s it, read that off to the support person and you’ll be on your way.

1. Launch Terminal and type the following command: sudo nano /etc/hostconfig
2. Find the following entry in the hostconfig file: SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
3. Change SPOTLIGHT=-NO- to SPOTLIGHT=-YES-
4. Save /etc/hostconfig by hitting Control-O and the return key. Next hit Control-X to exit the nano editor.
6. Disable the Spotlight index by typing the following in the Terminal: sudo mdutil -i on /
7. When you reboot, Spotlight will be enabled again.

If you would like to disable the Mac OS X Spotlight feature, follow our guide on How To Completely Disable Mac OS X Spotlight.

To do this, follow these simple steps.

Note that some other Mac OS X features and programs are based on Spotlight’s search abilities, therefore some applications could behave abnormally if you disable Spotlight, particularly in search functions.

Important: These instructions were created based on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. They may work on previous or future versions of OS X but they may not.

1. Launch Terminal and type the following command: sudo nano /etc/hostconfig
2. Find the following entry in the hostconfig file: SPOTLIGHT=-YES-
3. Change SPOTLIGHT=-YES- to SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
4. Save /etc/hostconfig by hitting Control-O and the return key. Next hit Control-X to exit the nano editor.
5. Disable the Spotlight index by typing the following in the Terminal:
   sudo mdutil -i off /
6. To erase the current Spotlight index, type: sudo mdutil -E /
7. When you reboot, Spotlight will be completely disabled.

If you find a need for Spotlight later, follow our guide on How To Re-enable Mac OS X Spotlight.

This is a simple task (like most things on the iPhone). Just follow these steps:

1. Make sure you sync your iPhone one last time so you have all of your content backed up to your computer.

2. On the iPhone, go to the Settings -> General -> Reset menu.

3. You’ll see the option to “Erase All Content and Settings”, select this option and confirm. This will do exactly what it says and remove all of the content (music, movies, pics, email, sms, etc) from your iPhone and set all of the settings back to their defaults.

This is a fairly common practice but if you’ve never done it on Mac OS X, then you probably need a hint as to how to do this.

The Hard Way

Step 1: Open up a Terminal windows (this is in your Applications/Utilites folder by default)

Step 2: Enter the following command to open the local host file. (Note: The sudo command requires an admin password to allow you to open this file as root.)

$ sudo vi /etc/hosts

Step 3: Now you can edit the host file. To add a new host entry, on it’s own line enter it in the format:

IP Address Host
0.0.0.0 example.domain.com

Step 4: Save the changes to your host file by pressing SHIFT + Z twice in vi.

As soon as you save this file the changes you made will take effect. To check the changes, you can ping the host you entered to see if it returns the correct address or just go to that host in a browser and see if your development environment opens instead of the production.

Step 1: Open up a Terminal windows (this is in your Applications/Utilites folder by default)

Step 2: Enter the follow command:

$ sudo vi /etc/paths

This will open the paths file in vi (a simple command line file editor included on your system).

Step 3: Edit the contents of your PATH file by putting each path you want included on a separate line.

Step 4: Save the contents of your PATH file by pressing SHIFT + Z twice.

That’s it! Now you know how to edit the PATH on your Mac OS X computer system.