The Tips - Mac Kung Fu - page 297

files). This can save battery life, especially if your Mac uses traditional
mechanical hard disks rather than solid-state disks, but it kicks in only after
ten minutes of inactivity—that is, ten minutes after the disk has not been
written to or read from.
Going to Sleep Faster
You can reduce this time delay at the command line, causing the hard disk
to go to sleep faster. You might find this helps save battery life, although there
might be a very brief system freeze each time as the hard disk spins up again.
The following command will make the delay five minutes, but only when the
battery is in use and not when the power cable is connected:
SYSTEMSETUP -SETHARDDISKSLEEP 5
Restoring Default Sleep Times
To restore things to the default, repeat the command, replacing the 5 with a
10 so that the default delay of ten minutes is reinstated:
SYSTEMSETUP -SETHARDDISKSLEEP 10
Tip 275
Force a File to be Found via Spotlight
Sometimes you might find a particular file simply won't appear in Spotlight's
search results, even though you know it should. For example, you're searching
for files containing the text QUARTERLYREPORT , but you later find that the file QUAR-
TERLYREPORT2012.XLS in your DOCUMENTS folder simply didn't show up.
Forcing Files to Be Indexed
The solution is as follows. Open a Terminal window (open Finder, select the
Applications list, and then in the list of applications double-click Terminal
within the UTILITIES folder), and type MDIMPORT ; then specify the filename and
location (or just drag and drop the file onto the Terminal window to autocom-
plete these details).
For example, to import the file mentioned earlier, contained in my DOCUMENTS
folder, I'd type the following:
MDIMPORT ~/DOCUMENTS/"QUARTERLY REPORT 2012.XLS"