OS X Maintenance

[Ric]

Forcing Periodic Maintenance

You may not know that every night, Mac OS X will run periodic maintenance tasks to get rid of unused logs and cache files. It also backs up some UNIX files.

However, these maintenance tasks were programmed by Apple, to run at night, at 3, 4 or 5 am, depending on what they do.

That is, unless your computer is turned off or asleep. Which most are. To perform them on Jaguar or Panther, open your "Terminal" (the Terminal can be found in the utilities folder which is in the Applications folder) (you will be asked for your Administrator password after the first one) and type :

sudo periodic daily

then press return, wait for it to finish, (it has finished when the prompt returns flashing): then type

sudo periodic weekly

then press return, wait for it to finish: then type

sudo periodic monthly


then press return, wait for it to finish, all done.

These scripts would normally be run by the "cron daemon", we will get into editing "crontab" files in a later tip.


If you want a good book try this "Unix for Mac OS X" I have a copy myself

 

[Danster]

I'm always usually up at that time so should i still do it? And if i do type that stuff into the terminal do I need to save it as an application like applescript?
(never used the terminal EVER)

 

[Ric]

If you're still up at that time and you Mac is on it does it automatically for you in the background. You won't even realise it's happening.

Using the Terminal on OS X is a bit like going back to the dark ages, but sometimes it can be very usefull and powerfull to know a few bits...

...I'll post a few tips that you can do tommorrow, some of us can no longer stay up all night playing with our 'puters' LOL...

...old age and children put paid to that !