[X Newbies] The Tasks, etc.

[James S Jones]

The importance of the cron tasks depends on how likely you are to 
accumulate the things it cleans up. Cron tasks don't run while the 
Mac's sleeping; that's why Mac janitor, etc, exist. Your G4 behaved 
correctly. Panther appears to have built-in permissions fixing when 
installers are run. I ran permissions fixing from Disk Utility, last 
night, for the first time in probably a month. It only fixed a couple 
of things--dramatically fewer than with 10.1 or 10.2.

As for your mother, you could do two things. Put Mac Janitor, or 
something like it, in via a startup script. It can run the cron tasks 
for her in the background. She doesn't even need to know it's 
happening. More important, for someone whose Mac has frequent 
unplanned, improper shutdowns, you should be sure she has journaling 
enabled.

On Dec 3, 2003, at 8:56 AM, Gregory Cortelyou wrote:

> I have lately been unduly obsessed with the so called "cron tasks" 
> that take place automatically if you leave your Mac on all the time. I 
> wonder how important they are, if those of us that are more savvy are 
> just more neurotic too. I use Mac Janitor on my PowerBook as I don't 
> wish to leave it on overnight. My G4 had been left on 24/7 for the 
> past year, but one of the fans is starting to make noise and I want to 
> preserve the life of the computer so I started leaving it asleep at 
> night and perform the tasks manually via Mac Janitor. Last night I got 
> out of bed to make sure it was asleep because I was afraid if I had 
> left it on, the automated task would repeat what I had already done, 
> or maybe would be on a different schedule and screw things up. Is that 
> even possible? (It was asleep by the way.) I have also started to 
> contemplate most of the other Mac OS X users I know who have never 
> heard of, don't care about, will not be bothered with such things as 
> "cron tasks", permissions and other thing we are obsessed with, and 
> seem no worse for the wear. My mother who has an iMac and lives in an 
> area that experiences frequent power outages, leaves her computer off 
> most of the time and wouldn't perform a daily Mac Janitor routine if 
> they paid her. Yet her system works fine. Apple does not mention these 
> tasks in any of its readily available user information and you will 
> not find anything if you type in cron tasks in the Mac help search 
> area. I will continue my faithful routines regardless, but is there 
> really any harm done in not doing them? Sorry for the length.