In previous versions of OS X, you could click the Spotlight icon in the menu bar to show the status of the Spotlight indexing, and it would show an estimate ("6 hours left"), along with a progress bar.
I've updated to Yosemite yesterday, and I noticed that Spotlight is not showing some expected results, i.e. files I know to be there, but it just doesn't find them if I type in their name and file type ("kind:excel vacation").
When I start typing in the Yosemite Spotlight window, it shows a small progress bar under the search box, but there's no estimate.
Is there another way to show the progress or an estimation on how long the indexing is going to take?
Best Answer
From this page
Show the status of Spotlight indexing for a volume
mdutil -s /Volumes/volumename↪︎
Here are some other Spotlight terminal commands
This comment thread suggests that there is not a great way to get an estimated time to completion.