4

I have a really weird spotlight problem and it is driving me insane.

When I open the spotlight search and type 1 the search box disappears as if it crashed. For example, if I intended to search for 1password, typing 1 will cause the box to disappear. However, if I type pass it works fine and finds the "1Password" app.

As far as I can tell this is the only character that triggers the crash.

I already tried the "disable indexing of bookmarks and history" fix and it doesn't help.

Is there some way to delete the spotlight index? Maybe that will help?

Any other clues I should look for?

I am on BigSur, but this also happened on Catalina, I was hoping the upgrade would fix it... but it did not. :(

Edit: adding the crash report

Process:               Spotlight [71310]
Path:                  /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotlight
Identifier:            com.apple.Spotlight
Version:               1.0 (2150.7.5)
Build Info:            SpotlightUI-2150007005000000~3
Code Type:             X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process:        ??? [1]
Responsible:           Spotlight [71310]
User ID:               502

Date/Time:             2021-03-22 23:30:10.116 -0700
OS Version:            macOS 11.2.1 (20D74)
Report Version:        12
Bridge OS Version:     3.0 (14Y908)
Anonymous UUID:        xxxx

Sleep/Wake UUID:       xxxx

Time Awake Since Boot: 740000 seconds
Time Since Wake:       55000 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread:        5  Dispatch queue: com.apple.root.user-interactive-qos.overcommit

Exception Type:        EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes:       0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Exception Note:        EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Application Specific Information:
dyld3 mode
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '-[__NSArrayM _fastCharacterContents]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x600002bb9e90'
terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException
abort() called
Improve this question
2
  • 1
    It does't happen on my Big Sur system. Is there a chance that the first document it loads is one that the preview crashes Spotlight? If you create another user account on the computer and run the query there, does it crash?
    – Daniel ♦
    Commented Mar 22, 2021 at 3:12
  • @Daniel I tried that and, yes, it doesn't crash!.... so what can I do about my actual user account? Is there some way to delete the spotlight index and start again? I have already tried to disable and re-enable indexing.
    – jm1234567890
    Commented Mar 22, 2021 at 4:58

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
2

If you don't get the crash on a fresh user account, you might want to force the system to rebuild the Spotlight index:

  • From the Apple menu, go to System Preferences
  • In System Preferences, select Spotlight, and chose the Privacy tab on the Spotlight screen
  • Click the "+" icon at the bottom of the screen and add a folder (any folder) to the list of folders excluded from spotlight
  • Once you've added the folder to the list of folders excluded from Spotlight, select that folder from the list
  • Click the "-" icon to remove the folder from the list of excluded folders.
  • From the System Preferences menu, select Quit.

The change to the excluded folders list should start the (long) process of rebuilding the Spotlight index. I can't promise that this will fix your problem, but it has a good shot at it.

Improve this answer
2
  • I tried this and it did not help :(
    – jm1234567890
    Commented Mar 23, 2021 at 6:27
  • Is there a deeper way to reset spotlight?
    – jm1234567890
    Commented Mar 23, 2021 at 6:29
1

This is a long shot, but it might work.

Spotlight might be crashing because the first document in the results somehow crashes Spotlight when previewed. A way to change that would be to change the results. So…

  • Create a folder on your desktop called "1".
  • Double click the folder to open it.
  • Close the window.
  • Try the spotlight search now and see if it crashes

If it doesn't crash, look at (but don't click yet!) the second file in the search results – that might be the one that has been giving you trouble. If spotlight then crashes when you click the second file in the list, that's a good sign that that particular file is the source of your problems.

Improve this answer
1

A couple of thoughts...

First, you might try searching for '1' in a Finder search window. That also uses spotlight, but since the results are presented through the Finder you might get a usable error message that will help you diagnose the problem.

Second, you can try working with the unix spotlight metadata commands, particularly mdfind and mdutil. The first lets you run spotlight queries from the command line, so you may get usable error messages. The second allows you to work with the metadata stores directly, even up to nuking the stores for particular volumes.

Improve this answer
0

It is rather drastic, but you can tell Spotlight to erase all indexes with this command in Terminal (which will ask for your password):

sudo mdutil -Ea

It will then rebuild all the indexes.

You can show the status of indexing with:

mdutil -sa or mdutil -sav

Improve this answer
1
  • Let me try this...
    – jm1234567890
    Commented Apr 1, 2021 at 19:29

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .