Will scripts run automatically ?

Question

If I shut down my Mac everynight(I live in a time zone 6 hours ahead of Eastern US time), will the scripts run automatically when I start it up the next morning...or...do I need a special utility application for this ?

Answer 1

these scripts are not worth worrying about. you should just leave them alone. the OS does a very good job of running them all by itself. and they are all quite useless anyway. many people (apparently yourself included) seem to think that these periodic scripts are important maintenance tools and will make your system run better and faster. nothing can be further from the truth.
*monthly scripts* :
1. archive and recycle fax logs. have you used your mac as a fax machine lately?
2. write accounting information (total uptime of every account) in the monthly.out log.
That's IT. so unless you use your mac as a fax machine (do you, really?) you don't need to run monthly scripts. EVER.
*weekly scripts*:
in snow leopard they do one thing ONLY: rebuild whois database. it's only useful if you are a unix user and actually use the whois terminal command at least on occasion. I'll bet my bottom dollar you never have and never will. then you don't need to run the weekly scripts either. EVER.
*daily scripts*
they do several things
1. clean up the logs from /Library/Logs/CrashReporter which are more than 60 days old. hardly an urgent task. and those logs are really very few unless your system is seriously messed up. you can go a year without deleting any and will collect a few MBs at the most.
2. delete junk from /tmp directory that's more than 3 days old.
This is done automatically on every reboot without any periodic scripts. if you don't reboot the computer then daily scripts will run *no matter* the schedule. if you don't sleep the computer at night they'll run at night. if you do sleep the computer at night they will run first thing in the morning when the computer is turned on. again, zero need to reschedule anything.
3. deletes files older than 7 days from /var/rwho. this is only relevant if you are running a unix network. otherwise there is nothing to delete - EVER.
4. rotate accounting files. again, those are nonexistent unless you are a unix administrator.
5. run the terminal command *df -l -h* and print out the output to daily.out. all this command does is list currently mounted hard drives. useless.
6.print the current network status in daily.out. this is again just reporting not maintenance.
7. Delete system messages. Once again this is relevant only for multi-user Unix systems.
8. remove scratch fax files. see my comment above about using your mac as a fax machine.
9. it writes some other accounting and system status info to daily.out. this is again only reporting and is ONLY actually present on unix networks.
and that's all, folks.