On Nov 13, 2005, at 1:13 PM, George H.Yankey wondered: > 1st. : I use MacJanitor on a regular basis . I am running OS > 10.3.9 and seldom shut down my computer . Is it helpful to use > MacJanitor ? I can't really tell if it helps or not.
There is a facility in all Unix systems called cron that can be used to schedule jobs to be run at regular times. There are periodic housekeeping jobs that Apple has set up to be run. The three sets of jobs are run daily, weekly and monthly. The daily jobs are scheduled at 3:15 every morning. The weekly jobs are at 4:30 on Sunday morning. The monthly jobs are run at 5:30 in the morning on the first day of the month. Many people don't have their computers awake at those times, so the jobs don't run. MacJanitor lets you run them whenever you want. If your computer is regularly on during the wee hours, then there is no need to run MacJanitor. The jobs are mostly mundane housekeeping tasks that probably won't make much difference whether or not they're run. They do things like hacking the old entries off the bottom of logs, rebuilding the locate database and trashing temporary files. You can look at the scripts in your /etc directory. They're called daily, weekly and monthly. In fact, it's easy to run them by hand instead of using MacJanitor. My PowerBook is seldom open overnight, so I run them every once in a while. Just open up a terminal window and type sudo /etc/weekly (or daily or monthly) It won't hurt anything to try it. I actually find this easier than MacJanitor. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 2408 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.math.louisville.edu/pipermail/macgroup/attachments/20051113/8f10f985/attachment.bin
