Spotlight refuses to index

[bwinter88]

Recently my apps stopped appearing in Spotlight so I forced it to reindex.

-I tried adding and removing my Mac HD from Spotlight privacy window and left the computer on overnight. No change in Spotlight results.

-I tried the terminal command to force a reindex and left the computer on overnight.
No change in Spotlight results.

-I unchecked and then re-checked Applications under the Spotlight preferences and left the computer on overnight. Still zero applications showing up in Spotlight results.

No mdworker processes have shown up, I can't detect my computer churning through any indexing, what is going on?

 

[bwinter88]

I've found the solution!

Spotlight index gets 'caught' on some corrupted files in /private/var/folders/zz.

I had to boot into Recovery mode, then run Terminal, then run this command:

rm -rf /private/var/folders/*

Disclaimer, the jury is out as to whether it's a good idea to delete everything in this folder, but it was a last ditch effort and things are working fine for me at the moment.