Force stop and then start a full crawl on all content sources in a SharePoint 2010 farm using PowerShell

There have been many times where I have needed to run a full crawl of all content sources on a SharePoint 2010 farm, but I quite often there are already crawls taking place, which I prefer to stop before starting a new one.

The script below walks through each content source and does the following:

1. Checks whether the crawl status is set to “Idle”
2. If the content source is currently involved in a crawl activity, stop the activity and wait until the status changes back to Idle
3. If the content source is Idle, then start a full crawl

To use, run the following script in the SharePoint Management Shell, replacing “Search Service Application” with the name of your Search service application:

Get-SPEnterpriseSearchCrawlContentSource -SearchApplication "Search Service Application" | ForEach-Object {
    if ($_.CrawlStatus -ne "Idle")
    {
        Write-Host "Stopping currently running crawl for content source $($_.Name)..."
        $_.StopCrawl()
       
        do { Start-Sleep -Seconds 1 }
        while ($_.CrawlStatus -ne "Idle")
    }
   
    Write-Host "Starting full crawl for content source $($_.Name)..."
    $_.StartFullCrawl()
}

For info, you can use the following script if you want to display the crawl status of all content sources on your farm:

Get-SPEnterpriseSearchCrawlContentSource -SearchApplication "Search Service Application" | select Name, CrawlStatus

This will give you an output similar to the following: