[G4] OSX system maintenance utilities

[Doug McNutt]

At 08:00 -0600 12/20/04, rich northouse shouted:
> WHAT DO THESE COMMANDS DO?	

If you really want to know what the periodic scripts do you can read the shell scripts, that they actually are, with any text editor.

/usr/sbin/periodic

is a bash script that is pointed to one of three directories which are

/etc/periodic/daily/
/etc/periodic/monthly/
/etc/periodic/weekly/

on any normal UNIX machine. But on Mac OS neXt they are:

/private/etc/periodic/daily/
/private/etc/periodic/monthly/
/private/etc/periodic/weekly/

Inside of those folders are separate scripts which are executed. Even if you're not an expert in bash you can get a feel by reading the comments.

It's probably a good idea to make copies in your own user space so as to avoid accidental changes. Finder will likely hide them from you but Terminal will not. Use the UNIX cp command or use cat and then copy and paste the content from the Terminal window.

Actually /usr/sbin/periodic checks for stuff in the defaults system too but I don't think there is anything there. Anyone know about that?

And check out Macaroni. The author is a friend.

-- 
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