Periodic Maintenance Scripts

I read this thread http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=3136865&#3136865
but it is closed so I coldn't post an additional question.
In understand about how the 3 maintenance scripts are supposed to work (Thank you Dr. Smoke!), but for a variety of reasons I need to put my MacBook Pro to sleep at night. Last night, I set the Energy Saver options to wake up at 3:00 AM, having previously checked to see that the daily script was set to run at 3:15. The computer goes to sleep after one hour, so that should have given enough time for the script to run.
This morning the daily script had NOT run, and the Console log is filled with entried like this:
Mar 21 03:30:47 administrators-computer DirectoryService[49]: Active Directory DS Plugin: Kerberos Time Skew Too Large. Check Date/Time!\n
(There are no entries between 3:00 and 3:30). The computer was not connected to the network where the AD lives (that is at work). Also, this morning when I woke the computer up manually, the clock was set at 3:40.
I can continue to run the daily script by hand, but I would rather not. Any help will be appreciated.
Walt

Make your life simpler. There are some excellent alternatives that completely automate running the maintenance scripts for you. You'll find them at VersionTracker or MacUpdate.
Macaroni - Shareware $8.00
Anacron - Freeware
PseudoAnacron - Freeware
These utilities check if the periodic maintenance scripts were run at their scheduled times, and if not runs them immediately. They assure the scripts are run when your computer is turned on so you needn't worry about scheduling the computer to wake up at a certain time.
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Similar Messages

Running Periodic Maintenance Scripts in Mountain Lion

Here's an oldie question that I think has been asked with every new version of Mac OS X. If a user shuts down his Mac in the evening and restarts in at 7AM the next morning, do the three periodic maintenance scripts ever run in Mountain Lion?
It's easy to run them manually in Terminal or even with with an Applescript that I wrote, but do they need to be run under the condition I posed above?
Thanks.

For those people stating that no one needs to run these scripts or that they're somehow dangerous, please reconsider before posting inaccurate things like that.
I haven't seen anyone stating that the scripts are dangerous. Clearly, they aren't. They are, however, unnecessary if the system is rebooted every day. The only exception is the periodic daily script 100.clean-logs, which deletes symbolic links in /Library/Logs/CrashReporter to crash and panic reports in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports older than 60 days. The reports themselves are deleted by a different process. Conceivably, if this script didn't run for a long enough time, the boot volume might fill up with broken symlinks to deleted crash reports. How long would that take?
Well, a symbolic link takes up 77 bytes of storage space. Storage devices, however, allocate space in minimum units of one sector, which is usually 512 bytes. Some of the newer 3 TB hard drives have a 4096-byte sector size. So let's make some worst-case assumptions. Your boot drive is 3 TB, and you have only 1% of that space free, which is 30 GB. You generate 100 crash reports a day -- those being only crashes of system processes, of course, not user processes, which are logged to a different place. So your volume is filling up with symbolic links at the rate of about 400 KB a day. At that rate, it would take only about 75 years to fill it up completely.
So you're quite correct. If your system is always shut down -- not in sleep -- between the hours of 3:15 and 5:30 AM every day, you should manually run 100.clean-logs at least once every 75 years. Let's say once every 25 years, to be on the safe side. Thanks for pointing that out.
Properly Maintain Macbook pro: Apple Support Communities

Is periodic maintenance really necessary?

Is it really necessary, and does it really accomplish anything? And if so, why isn't it mentioned in the user-pamphlet that came with the machine?
I've read several threads about running "sudo periodic daily weekly monthly", and whether or not it will get run automatically if the machine is asleep or powered off at the scheduled time, and how to run it manually or download tools to automate the process.
But I've also seen some things saying it doesn't really accomplish much.
It seems like if it was really necessary that apple should advertise it better and make it more straight forward for novice users to do it.

Not true. If the Mac is asleep at the appointed hour of the maintenance scripts execution (3:15 am) the scripts will run soon after the Mac is awakened. But if the Mac is turned off at night, the scripts do not run when the Mac is booted. The countdown clock is reset to 0 and if the Mac is consistently shut down before 3:15 am, then the scripts will never run.
It has already been established in another thread that the OP shuts down his Mac every evening and his Mac's scripts have not been run for some time.

Running Maintenance Scripts for Mac OS 10.5.8 HELP!

I am trying to run the maintenance scripts on my laptop for the first time. I go to Terminal type in "sudo periodic daily weekly monthly" and hit return. A warning message pops up the some data may be lost.... and the the Password prompt comes up. I back up consistently so I just want to run the scripts since it has never been done. However, when I try to type in my password, NOTHING types. I hit return and tried again, but nothing. Can someone please help me figure out what is wrong and if there is any other maintenance I need to do to the system?
Thanks in advance for any help.

You don't need to use any utility, or perform any procedure, to make sure OS X's built-in maintenance tasks have run under OS X 10.5 and later.
OS X 10.5 will run its cron jobs automatically (actually, they are no longer handled by the UNIX facility "cron", they are now handled by a similar facility called "launchd". if that means anything to you) whether you have left your computer on all night or not. You no longer need a utility to run missed maintenance as of OS X 10.5. It will run automatically at the next available opportunity. Actually, this was the case as of OS X 10.4, but a bug kept the maintenance routines from running more than once per restart under OS X 10.4. This was fixed in OS X 10.5
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6552347
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/5
http://developer.apple.com/macosx/launchd.html

Maintenance scripts

Hi everyone,
I have two questions that I need help with, both related to the running of maintenance scripts. I downloaded and installed "anacron" the other day. When I check terminal, I notice that the daily maintenance script runs between midnight and 1am each day. I'm pretty sure that the default time for Tiger is somewhere between 3 and 4 am, a time which is assumed to not have much user activity. If the maintenance scripts are now being run around midnight or 1am, times when I am likely to be using the computer, will I notice a system slowdown? I've heard that supplemental maintenance scripts programs, (like Onyx, anacron, macjanitor, etc) are not necessary.
I would uninstall the program, but I've tried searching for the files that the readme says to delete, and I am unable to find them (using the Finder and EasyFind). I am not sure if the program has now replaced Tiger maintenance, and if I delete anacron then the Tiger scripts won't run anymore. Can someone provide me with a way to safely uninstall the program and ensure that the scripts will still run? Thank you.

Hi Louis
I have been running Anacron for several years with no problems. You will not know when it is running most of the time unless you hear your hardrive clicking. Since my computer sleeps through the scheduled times it normally would run, it will run the scrips at times after the time period exceeds the time limit set since last run. Daily scripts every 24 hrs., etc. Anacron will check every hour to test the time limit to see if it needs to run and will run the scripts when needed. Therefore, if your computer was sleeping or off less than 24 hrs. of the time the daily script was set to run or since the last time it was run and you wake it or turn it on 3 days later, the daily script will run approximately 15 minutes past the next hour.
As I said, it has never given me a problem and you won't ever have to worry about the log files getting bloated.
These scripts don't really need to be run that often and some people prefer to use manuel programs such as ONYX to run them on occasion. That's probably more of a personal preference. I choose not to want to think about it and let Anacron do it's thing. If I ever think it may be causing problems, I won't hesitate to remove it. But so far on 3 computers, no problems.
But if you feel the need to uninstall it follow this:
To uninstall Anacron, go to Hard Drive/Library/LaunchDaemons/anacron.plist. Move the file "anacron.plist" to the desktop and restart the computer. Then you can trash anacron.plist file.
Or, search in the Finder or with spotlight for Anacron. You will see the "anacron.plist" file. Delete it and restart the computer. Then you will be able to empty the trash.
I can't really say how much this and permission repair has really helped, but I can tell you that for 3 years I have virtually no problems with my computers and have never had to reinstall the operating system on any of them other than updating or moving to the newer OSX.

Maintenance Scripts?? MacJanitor?

On my G4 iBook running 10.3 I found and used an app called Macjanitor.
Here is the blurb from their site.
Freeware utility to run the system's daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance scripts.
These scripts are normally run between 3am and 5am, and will not be run if you shut off your Mac at night. This can allow log files to grow very large, and prevent system databases from getting backed up.
With MacJanitor, you can run these scripts 'by hand' periodically without having to use the Terminal to keep your Mac OS X machine in top racing form.
Excellent for laptop users and others who shut off or put their Macs to sleep at night.
Supposedly normal set maintenance scripts in OS X are set to run around 3-5am (not sure where you see this) but they will only run if the system is on (of course) and Not asleep. Well I can guarantee my system is alseep as that time !!
I also stumbled across someone commenting on how useless MacJanitor was because they use something called Aancron http://members.cox.net/18james/anacron-tiger.html
Blurb from their site
Anacron runs the periodic daily, weekly and monthly tasks on your Mac even if the machine (a laptop, for example) spends much of its time asleep or switched-off. Anacron silently checks when you reboot and every sixty minutes while the computer is running to see if the various periodic scripts are overdue, and runs them if necessary. The advantage of Anacron over many other solutions to this issue is that it runs as a proper Unix background process, requires no user intervention, and uses the regular periodic scripts, including local additions or modifications.
Sounds like a better solution, but I curious to what others due for running these maintenance scripts?
Has anyone used either of these 2 programs under 10.4?
Opinions and experiences please.

Yes, I use OnyX because it runs them at times I have scheduled it to do so. 10.4.0 or later runs them automatically, if the computer is on and idle at 1AM, which isn't normal for many people so running them with an app can be good if you leave your machine running for days or weeks at a time. That said if you shut down your machine down every night there is no need to because the tasks will be run at boot each morning.

Root crontab no system maintenance scripts

Server: HP DL380, Redhat 4 update 6 (download from linux.oracle.com)
Today I checked crontab and noticed that there are no system maintenance scripts running under root, to e.g. rotate log files, etc. Is this normal, any suggestions please?
Best regards

Check the directories below. Linux cron has directories for hourly, daily, weekly and monthly root scripts where you can drop scripts that you want to run periodically. This is handy if you do not want to maintain a root crontab file.
ll /etc |grep cron
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 329 Sep 28 2004 anacrontab
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 27 15:37 cron.d
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 7 16:08 cron.daily
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 12 2007 cron.deny
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 20 2004 cron.hourly
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 May 12 2007 cron.monthly
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 255 Sep 20 2004 crontab
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 28 2007 cron.weekly

Do I need maintenance scripts ?

I am using Macaroni which runs Unix maintenance script every time I start the computer. At night the cpmputer is shut off. Do I really need to run these scripts with Snow Leopard ?

I know people have weighed in on this before.
sudo periodic all
that is all and no I don't leave mine on, or run them daily, in fact hardly at all. But I do other things to keep the system in top shape.
as long as the utility is certified compatible, you are fine. I think Onyx, SL Cache Cleaner and others can also automatically schedule cron to run next time, I just don't do anything automatic.
Every time you start? or once a day? some scripts are only weekly and monthly anyway.

Cron & missed maintenance scripts

Hiya.
I'm assuming the cron-driven daily/weekly/monthly maintenance scripts are not run if the computer is sleeping.
What (if any) is the easiest way to get caught up on those if missed for a while?
Thanks in advance...

Hi--
They're actually not run by cron any more, but by launchd. So, if the computer is sleeping, but not actually off, they will eventually run. On my PowerBoook, the daily runs about once a week, the weekly every couple of months, and the monthly not often at all.
If you want to run them by hand, you can easily run them in the Terminal (press the "enter" key after each line):
<pre class="command">sudo periodic daily
sudo periodic weekly
sudo periodic monthly</pre>
I think you can run them all like this, too:
<pre class="command">sudo periodic daily weekly monthly</pre>
but I've never run them that way. I either let them run on their own, or run them one at a time.
charlie

Run Maintenance Scripts

On my PM G5 in the past I have successfully run maintenance scripts as follows:
periodic daily weekly monthly
from the terminal window with no problems. Usually when the command line is
executed the sys asks for master password and when it is entered, the program runs
without further messages, only cursor displayed, until it finishes and returns
the command line prompt.
Now suddenly when the command is executed the sys returns:
208-106-62-250:~ richardrkelley$ periodic daily
/usr/sbin/periodic: line 1: /var/log/daily.out: Permission denied
/usr/sbin/periodic: line 106: 370 Broken pipe date
cat: /tmp/periodic.7sKejqD8Mz: Bad file descriptor
cat: /tmp/periodic.7sKejqD8Mz: Bad file descriptor
cat: /tmp/periodic.7sKejqD8Mz: Bad file descriptor
208-106-62-250:~ richardrkelley$
I have run the disk utility and repaired permissions and repaired the disk
with no change. There were some minor repairs done to permissions and disk.
I would appreciate advice as the how to fix this problem and to prevent
future occurrence of same.
Thanks all.

Oops; I had a senior moment.
The correct command to run maint scripts is:
sudo periodic ........
sorry for the dumb question.

Reschedule maintenance scripts?

Is there a way to reschedule the maintenance scripts that run from 3:15 until 5:30?
I would like to run them earlier so that I can shut down the computer before I go to bed, since I don't want to leave the machine on all night. I know you can do them manually, but I don't want to have to do that every day.
Also, does anyone know if there would be some sort of problem if I rescheduled them? Can one continue working while they are running?
Thanks
eMac 1.25GHz, 512MB Mac OS X (10.3.5)

Sorry for the dead link. I guess O'Reilly has issues with a direct link. Here's another site that explains how to edit crontab-
Using the cron maintenance utility
Though written for 10.1 the instructions are the same. Your system crontab file will look different. Scripts are run by periodic in Panther instead of directly running a specific script. Try experimenting with pico if you haven't used a command line text editor before. The OS is full explanations try the following commands in the Terminal application-
man cron
man periodic
man periodic.conf
man pico
man 5 crontab
man crontab
Try NifflerX's suggestion if this seems to hard. Though using the Terminal way is good practice for changing system configuration files without the risk of gumming up your OS.

Maintenance scripts question

I was just wondering if the daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance scripts will run overnight if I have the 'puter set to sleep after an hour or so. In other words, will it wake itself to do maintenance? Thanks!

If you would like to forget about the problem then download and install either Macaroni or PseudoAnacron - VersionTracker or MacUpdate. They will automatically run the scripts whenever the computer becomes available if they did not run at their scheduled times.
Kappy's Personal Suggestions for OS X Maintenance
For disk repairs use Disk Utility. For situations DU cannot handle the best third-party utilities are: Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.0 is now Intel Mac compatible. TechTool Pro provides additional repair options including file repair and recovery, system diagnostics, and disk defragmentation. TechTool Pro 4.6.1 is Leopard compatible; Drive Genius is similar to TechTool Pro in terms of the various repair services provided. The current version, 1.5.1, is Intel Mac compatible.
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep.
OS X automatically defrags files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems.
I would also recommend downloading the shareware utility TinkerTool System that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old logfiles and archives, clearing caches, etc.
For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the commandline. Note that presently AppleJack is not compatible with Leopard.
When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. PsynchX 2.1.1 and RsyncX 2.1 (Freeware)
6. Carbon Copy Cloner (Freeware - 3.0 is a Universal Binary)
7. SuperDuper! (Commercial)
8. Data Backup (Commercial)
The following utilities can also be used for backup, but cannot create bootable clones:
1. Backup (requires a .Mac account with Apple both to get the software and to use it.)
2. Toast
3. Impression
4. arRSync
Apple's Backup is a full backup tool capable of also backing up across multiple media such as CD/DVD. However, it cannot create bootable backups. It is primarily an "archiving" utility as are the other two.
Impression and Toast are disk image based backups, only. Particularly useful if you need to backup to CD/DVD across multiple media.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.
Additional suggestions will be found in Mac Maintenance Quick Assist.
Referenced software can be found at www.versiontracker.com and www.macupdate.com.

Maintenance scripts, whats that all about?

In this case I do not actually have a problem, but have heard about on other forums recently something about scripts running in the middle of the night, assuming you leave your computer on that somehow magically keep your Mac working properly. I did a search on the apple forums for this but to no avail.
Anyone know what this is about? Does it actually work, and if so why?
From my perspective it seems like one could cause more problems by always leaving a pc on, due to power failures or surges etc.
Thanks in advance for some insight on this, or links where I could learn more.

Yes, the Keebler elves are busy late at night keeping the computer problem free!
There are three maintenance scripts that Unix runs on a daily, weekly, and monthly schedule. The scripts are run automatically between 3 and 5 am provided the computer is turned on and not sleeping. The scripts perform certain general maintenance chores such as deleting old log and temporary files, rotating the logs, and updating the lookup database.
These maintenance activities prevent log files from growing to unwieldy size which also tends to keep the logs from becoming corrupted. This does help keep OS X running smoother, but they hardly keep OS X completely free of problems. Other efforts are needed:
Kappy's Personal Suggestions for OS X Maintenance
For disk repairs the best third-party utility is Disk Warrior. DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption. However, DW is not yet compatible with Intel Macs. TechTool Pro provides additional repair options including file repair and recovery, system diagnostics, and disk defragmentation. TechTool Pro 4.5.1 is Intel Mac compatible.
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility called Macaroni that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep.
OS X automatically defrags files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems.
I would also recommend downloading the shareware utility TinkerTool System that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old logfiles and archives, clearing caches, etc.
For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the commandline.
When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is significant):
1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk 6 (Shareware)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. SuperDuper (Commercial)
6. Carbon Copy Cloner (Freeware - not universal binary.)
7. LaCie SilverKeeper (Freeware - not universal binary)
8. RsynchX 2.1 and PsyncX 2.2.1 (Freeware)
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.
Additional suggestions will be found in Mac Maintenance Quick Assist.
Referenced software can be found at www.versiontracker.com and www.macupdate.com.

Maintenance Scripts not running

Purchased a mac mini a few days ago. Noticed in my system log: Recent contents: that it doesn't seem to be running the overnight maintenance. It reads:
Nov 20. 03: 15: 02 - geoff powells computer: mac - mini. cp: error processing extended attributes. Operation not permitted.
This is updated daily with the same result. Mini is left running 24/7.
Phoned Apple Tech Support who said their G4s syslogs said the same.
But couldn't say if the scripts were running or not.
Anyone any clues.
The sys log of my G5 running 10.3.8 shows a restart everyday.

Hi Geoff,
Welcome to Discussions!
Your system works perfectly well and the Periodic maintenance runs.
- That a system log starts precisely at 3:15 shows alone that your computer is left on all night and the Daily script runs at its default scheduled time.
--> Open Console again and see the three Periodic maintenance logs. They are daily.out, monthly.out and weekly.out.
If your computer never sleeps, you should find that they were run at 3:15am every day (daily task), 3:15am on Saturdays (weekly task), and 5:30am on the first day of each month (monthly task).
Note that since 10.4.2 they are able to run "delayed" in case your computer was sleeping during the night. This enhancement works perfectly well with the Daily Task, but not very reliably with the Weekly and the Monthly.
Still no running at all if computer shut down at night.
HTH
Axl

Mac OS X maintenance scripts and multiple user accounts

Hi everyone
Just wondering how the default maintenance scripts scheduled to run in the early morning works with multiple user accounts. Our Macs at home all have multiple user accounts (one for each of us) and I'm wondering whether the scripts work their magic across all accounts (assuming the computer itself is switched on AND not asleep).
Also, is the behaviour the same regardless of Mac OS X version? More specifically we're using snow leopard, lion, mountain lion, and maybe shortly mavericks.
Thanks!
Joe.

The maintenance scripts run by periodic perform system tasks. They do nothing in a user's account (unless you modify the scripts or create your own). They are primarily designed for long lived systems (servers). There isn't any magic nor would a normal mac users find any differences whether they ran or not.
In all the operating system versions that you mention, the scripts will run when the computer wakes, assuming that the computer was turned on before the prescribe times.

Periodic Maintenance Scripts

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