[X4U] System Log Question

[Philip J Robar]

On Jul 30, 2006, at 8:41 AM, Jim Robertson wrote:

> This morning I noticed that Console was open to the system.log
>
> The message displayed was:
>
> Jul 30 03:15:19 JSR-PowerMac-G5 cp: error processing extended  
> attributes:
> Operation not permitted
>
> I KNOW I was asleep at 3 am. What does this mean? Did one of the
> applications I left open try to do something it should not have?
>
> Should I be worried?

I searched Google for this (hint, hint) and found the following  
explanation at several sites:

http://web.mac.com/ordonezi/iWeb/Tips%20and%20Tricks/Sever%20Tips% 
20and%20Tricks/3E1CFED9-BC40-4E29-A295-DB30759744E4.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/fo3q9

Quoting this site:

cp: error processing extended attributes: Operation not permitted

Annoying huh?  Every day, this error message is added to your log  
early in the A.M. Why is this happening? Well our /usr/sbin/periodic  
daily script is trying to do the following action:

cp /dev/null $tmp_output

Since /dev/null isn’t just any old file cp can’t fully copy it. To  
make this message go away fire up pico, nano, vi, emac, etc. and  
edit /usr/sbin/periodic find the line above and change it to:

 > $tmp_output

Go ahead and run the following command to make sure you did it right.  
No errors in terminal or system log means it’s running correctly

/usr/sbin/periodic daily

This change will do the same thing as originally set but won’t output  
an error to your system logs. Make sure you’re VERY careful when  
editing this file and only make the changes noted above.