Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2009 7:14 am Post subject: spreadsheet files no longer indexed by Spotlight
A week ago I upgraded to Snow Leopard, and since then it seems that Spotlight stopped indexing my spreadsheet (.ods) files. They were indexed flawlessly until upgrade to 10.6.
Text files created/saved with NeoOffice seem to be indexed fine.
The files show up when I search for the filename (so Spotlight does find them) but no results when I do a search for terms inside the files.
I have re-indexed Spotlight, but no difference. Any suggestions?
TIA, Leo
When you select the Apple :: About this Mac menu, is the version displayed in the dialog Mac OS X 10.6 or 10.6.1? If it says 10.6, can you select the Apple :: Software Update menu, install all of the system updates that are listed, and tell us if Spotlight still does not work?
Also, can you launch the /Applications/Utilities/Terminal application, copy the following command into the Terminal window, press the Return key, and paste the output into this forum topic? This will tell us if you have conflicting Spotlight plugins for .ods files:
Code:
mdimport -L
Lastly, can you tell us what version of NeoOffice you are running? You can get the version by selecting NeoOffice's Help :: About NeoOffice menu. We have not made any changes to NeoOffice's Spotlight plugin in a while, but I did change some of the scripts in the NeoOffice 3.0.1 Early Access installation scripts for Snow Leopard.
Thanks for your speedy reply, sorry for omitting this relevant info:
I have OSX 10.6.1 and updated NeoOffice to 3.0.1 Early Access just yesterday, but that made no difference.
Your suggested command in the Terminal renders this:
Do you know if Spotlight could ever find your .ods files? I ask this because I cannot get NeoOffice's Spotlight plugin to find my test .ods file on either Leopard or Snow Leopard so there may be a bug in our code.
Yes, the ods files have always been indexed perfectly fine but it changed immediately after updating to Snow Leopard. And as I said, re-indexing didn't help.
I've experimented a bit more, and it seems it only applies to ods files saved after upgrading to SL: older files still show up in Spotlight when searched on content.
Not a life-threatening problem, just inconvenient and strange...
I think you have found a very big Snow Leopard bug. I recompiled our Spotlight plugin and I have found that on Snow Leopard, invoking a subcommand (we invoke the "unzip" command) fails on all files, not just .ods files. I suspect that your .odt files are OK because after NeoOffice's Spotlight plugin encounters a failure, Mac OS X will "fallback" to TextEdit's Spotlight plugin.
Cleary Apple has changed something in Snow Leopard that prevents executing subcommands within a Spotlight plugin. What I need to do is rewrite our unzipping code so that it avoids this new Snow Leopard restriction.
I will post an update in the next day or so when I have more news.
I have a little more information as to why this bug is occurrring. It appears that starting in Mac OS X 10.6, invoking the popen(), system(), and fork() functions in a Spotlight plugin will always fail.
Clearly, Apple has imposed a new restriction in Mac OS X 10.6 to purposely prevent Spotlight plugins from running subcommands so I have no choice but to rewrite our Spotlight plugin to uncompress the .odt, .ods, and .odp files in our code instead of using the simpler "unzip" command.
FYI. I have fixed this bug and my fix has been included in the NeoOffice 3.0.1 and 2.2.6 releases. These releases can be downloaded from the following URL:
Can you install NeoOffice 3.0.1 and see if Spotlight now finds your .ods files? You should not need to force Spotlight to reindex as the NeoOffice 3.0.1 installation will trigger reindexing of any files that use our Spotlight plugin. Note that you may need to wait a few minutes for Spotlight to finish this reindexing.
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