Permissions denied... Mac Janitor

Question

It used to take several minutes to run Mac Janitor, and the screen would run through lots of text. The last couple times, however, it's lasted only about 30 seconds, and I've gotten this message, in the weekly output section:
Rebuilding locate database:
mktemp: mkdtemp failed on /var/folders/IJ/IJ4RJBMEEiq4xFYBCoRDE++TI/-Tmp-//locateEXdhhERyTi: Permission denied
Rebuilding whatis database:
makewhatis: /usr/share/man//usr/share/man:/usr/X11/man: No such file or directory
makewhatis: /usr/X11/man//usr/share/man:/usr/X11/man: No such file or directory
Is this a problem? I don't really know what this means; if anyone can help me out I would greatly appreciate it. I'm also posting this in the iBook G4 forum, since I wasn't really sure which place would be the best...
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

This is really not the case. Currently Leopard will run the standard maintenance tasks at the normally scheduled times - between 3:30 am and 5:30 am depending on whether it's the daily, weekly, or monthly script. These scripts are now under the control of what is known as launchd - a daemon that runs specific control preference files located in the LaunchAgents or LaunchDaemons folders of the /System/Library/ folder. These control scripts will run the maintenance scripts at their scheduled times if the computer is running (not asleep.) If the computer is shut down or sleeping at the scheduled time, then launchd will run the scripts when the computer next becomes active.
There is a caveat to the above. The following is quoted from ( The XLab FAQs):
"While it may appear that launchd executes the maintenance scripts "on the fly" if the computer is asleep or shutdown at the appointed time, this is a side effect of how the timer treats time the computer has spent in sleep mode. The timer used by launchd does not count sleep time. If your Mac is asleep at the scheduled time at which a given script is supposed to run, the script may run later that day, at a time shifted by the amount of time the Mac was asleep. However, if you restart your Mac before the time-shifted execution time, pending events are lost and the script will not run off-schedule: the next chance for the script to run will be at its regularly scheduled time.
If you regularly restart your Mac and the computer regularly sleeps or is shutdown at the scheduled times, it's possible that the scripts will never run, hence one should still run them manually, say on a weekly basis.
The sleep time shift is also cumulative. For example, if you don't restart your Mac for weeks or months at a time, but let it sleep when not in use, this can result in:
The daily script running once every few days or never.
The weekly script once every few weeks or never.
The monthly script once every few months or never.
The time shift in each case is the total amount of time the Mac has spent in sleep since its last restart. If you have a process that writes heavily to the logs, you can wind up devoting good hard disk space to the log files."
Freeing up space is not the purpose of using Onyx or other utility for running the maintenance scripts, although that is a side effect of one of the scripts that clears old log and temporary files, but the amount of space involved is hardly significant. What you see Onyx doing most likely is removing cache files, something that isn't necessary unless you are experiencing operating system malfunctions. Clearing caches otherwise simply means you have to spend time during the next restart waiting for the OS to rebuild the caches you've deleted. Caches can take up megabytes of disk space, but they are there for a reason and except for what's stated previously need not and should not be deleted.
Mac Janitor does not remove cache files. The way in which Leopard handles the maintenance services is generally adequate for most users. If you feel you must help them along then use something more appropriate than Mac Janitor. Please see;
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.x is now Intel Mac compatible. TechTool Pro provides additional repair options including file repair and recovery, system diagnostics, and disk defragmentation. TechTool Pro 4.5.1 or higher are Intel Mac compatible; Drive Genius is similar to TechTool Pro in terms of the various repair services provided. Versions 1.5.1 or later are 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. Dependence upon third-party utilities to run the periodic maintenance scripts had been significantly reduced in Tiger and Leopard.
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 AppleJack 1.5 is required for 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. Carbon Copy Cloner (Donationware)
6. SuperDuper! (Commercial)
7. Intego Personal Backup (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.