I opened up Spotlight, typed '12*' to do some multiplication and it's been frozen for the last 20 minutes.
I am looking for how to restart the program/service/whatever it technically is, but it's not in the Force Quit menu, so what is the quickest way to kill this process without restarting my computer? (I am on Mac OS X Snow Leopard)
Depending on your OS and luck, it could actually be 1 of at least a few [services]:
mdsSystemUIServerSpotlightTo me, a while back when they were called feline names, I've had the same issue (as I was saying on the comments) and it was not Spotlight: it was the Menubar. Just like with spotlight, we simply have to kill it so it will be restarted by launchd.
For that, use the Activity Monitor and search for your [service].
Or you may instead use the Terminal, for instance:
killall Spotlight
And if that doesn't work, consider using sudo.
Just ran into Spotlight itself crashing. The answer for that problem is just going to the Terminal and typing:
killall Spotlight
Fixed the Spotlight freeze problem!
The first post is correct that mds is the process for spotlight. You can kill it in activity monitor or:
sudo killall mds
from the terminal. The process will restart automatically as it is managed as a launchd item that is set to always be running.
You might look at
man mdutil
as well. This is a utility at the command line for managing mds settings on volumes.
It'll probably show up in /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app. Select All Processes in the toolbar to see processes of all users.
The screenshot is from when I was searching something. I guess you'd kill mds by pressing Cmd-Opt-Q after selecting it to terminate Spotlight, but I'm not sure -- probably best if you checked CPU usage and/or if the name of a process is written in red, indicating it froze.
I'm not sure why this wasn't mentioned on here, but I had a locked up Spotlight menu/search box was able to solve the problem by killing the Spotlight process using the Activity monitor. None of the other actions mentioned in other answers worked.
This was on OS X El Capitan.
killall SystemUIServer
Works every time (and is the only only service that had any effect) in Catalina.
sudo not needed. You'll see your Menubar briefly flash as the process restarts.
For the record, just had this issue but I couldn't get terminal or activity monitor to work. The solution? Use Apple+Option+esc to bring up the Force Quit Applications dialog, select the trouble app, then click the "force quit" button.
Cheers!
In Yosemite: kill mds_stores and mds. They'll restart automatically and then Spotlight works again. At least, that's my experience.
In Activity Monitor I stopped "Quick Look UI Helper." This might be a bit less brute force than some of the other suggestions, assuming that's what is hanging up in your case, too.
06-19-14 I had a Spotlight-created, seemingly frozen dialog box describing an Evernote note with 0KB. I logged off, then logged back in. The dialog box disappeared. Did not need to reboot. Spotlight itself continued to function normally even though the previous "hit" was still stuck on the Desktop screen.
