RUNNING DIAGNOSTIC ON MAC OS X

Question

Do I need to run a system diagnostics and analysis kind of software to use in my macbook? I know we don't use or install Anti virus, spywares and other utilities that Windows have. How do you check the overall status and performance of your hard drive and also check if you have a corrupt files? One software I have in my mind is Techtool Pro. Do I really need this?

Answer 1

you can copy/paste to the terminal and do maintenance on your Mac.
The Terminal way
Using your Admin account, you can execute all three maintenance scripts at once, as follows:
1. Launch Terminal, in the Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities folder.
2. At the Terminal prompt, type the following, exactly as written:
3. sudo periodic daily weekly monthly
4. Press Return.
5. Type your Admin password when prompted, then press Return.
All three scripts will run in sequence. There is no visual feedback while the scripts execute. You will know they are completed when the Terminal prompt returns.
You can also run the scripts individually. For example, to run just the daily script, you would type the command:
sudo periodic daily
in step 2 above.
Determining when the maintenance scripts last ran
You can execute a Terminal command to quickly check the date and time stamps of the log files associated with each maintenance script. This indicates when the scripts' own logs were last updated, and hence when the scripts were last executed.
1. Launch Terminal, in the Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities folder.
2. At the Terminal prompt, type the following, exactly as written:
3. ls -al /var/log/*.out
4. Press Return.
You will see output similar to the following:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 467984 8 May 10:40 /var/log/daily.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1258 8 May 10:43 /var/log/monthly.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 198378 8 May 10:43 /var/log/weekly.out
In this example, the scripts last ran on 8 May of the current year, between 10:40 and 10:43 local time. The date and time stamps in the example are the result of running the scripts manually using Terminal. If the scripts were run automatically on their default schedule, their date stamps would vary and their time stamps would indicate executions between 03:15 and 05:30 hours.