When do the perodic maintenance scripts run?

Question

In previous versions of OS X, we could see at what time the scripts were running by looking the files:
com.apple.periodic-daily.plist
com.apple.periodic-weekly.plist
com.apple.periodic-weekly.plist
In fact I had a script for that:
cd  /System/Library/LaunchDaemons
PLISTBUDDY=/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy
$PLISTBUDDY -x -c "Print :StartCalendarInterval" com.apple.periodic-daily.plist
$PLISTBUDDY -x -c "Print :StartCalendarInterval" com.apple.periodic-weekly.plist
$PLISTBUDDY -x -c "Print :StartCalendarInterval" com.apple.periodic-weekly.plist
But is Mavericks, the content of these files have changed and the time is missing. Here is an example of the new files:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
          <key>AbandonProcessGroup</key>
          <true/>
          <key>Label</key>
          <string>com.apple.periodic-weekly</string>
          <key>LaunchEvents</key>
          <dict>
                    <key>com.apple.xpc.activity</key>
                    <dict>
                              <key>com.apple.periodic-weekly</key>
                              <dict>
                                        <key>AllowBattery</key>
                                        <false/>
                                        <key>GracePeriod</key>
                                        <integer>14400</integer>
                                        <key>Interval</key>
                                        <integer>604800</integer>
                                        <key>Priority</key>
                                        <string>Maintenance</string>
                                        <key>Repeating</key>
                                        <true/>
                              </dict>
                    </dict>
          </dict>
          <key>LowPriorityIO</key>
          <true/>
          <key>Nice</key>
          <integer>1</integer>
          <key>ProgramArguments</key>
          <array>
                    <string>/usr/libexec/periodic-wrapper</string>
                    <string>weekly</string>
          </array>
</dict>
</plist>
Does anybody know where we can set the times for these scripts? The purpose is to allow the iMacs to sleep at night.

Answer 1

DlacVal wrote:
Does anybody know where we can set the times for these scripts? The purpose is to allow the iMacs to sleep at night.
There is no need for that. Unlike traditional *NIX OS's that run these jobs using cron, OS X now uses launch daemons to run these (& many other) jobs. The benefit is a cron job won't run if the computer is asleep or powered down at the time set for a job, while ones started by launch daemons are queued up & run the next time the computer is awake.
For more about this, see page 12 of the Mavericks Core Technology Overview pdf. (Also maybe check out the Timer Coalescing discussion beginning on page 8.)
The battery, priority, & other key/value pairs in the plists insure that the maintenance tasks will run only when they have the least impact on performance & power consumption.
If you want to see when they have run you can use Console to look at the daily.out, weekly.out, & monthly.out logs (in the /var/log section). You should see that they do not run at fixed times, nor should they.