Open Terminal, located in the Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities folder.

Using your Admin account, you can run all three maintenance scripts at once: As with other utilities, employ the version of Anacron that is compatible with the version of Mac OS X you are using. It runs the maintenance scripts automatically if the computer is awake and the scripts have not run when scheduled.

While we have not tested it, we have read positive reports from users of the freeware application Anacron. For example, running all three scripts weekly is a good habit if your Mac is frequently shutdown or in sleep mode overnight. These utilities permit running any individual maintenance script daily, weekly, or monthly or all of them. Employ the version of the utility that is compatible with to the version of Mac OS X you are using.

You may find additional solutions by searching MacUpdate or VersionTracker. Manually running the maintenance scripts The easy wayĭownload and install a third-party utility, such as Cocktail or Yasu, that provides a function for running the maintenance scripts. More information about maintaining Mac OS X can be found in our 'Maintaining Mac OS X' FAQ.

How the scripts are launched on a schedule.

The maintenance performed by the scripts.

Determining when the maintenance scripts last ran.

Procedures for manually running the maintenance scripts.

This FAQ, derived from our book Troubleshooting Mac OS X, provides: If your Mac is shut down or left in sleep mode overnight, the maintenance scripts should be run manually on a regular basis unless you plan on devoting a large portion of your hard drive to the files cleaned-up by these routines! This results in log files that will grow over time, consuming free space on your Mac OS X startup disk. If your Mac is shut down or in sleep mode during these hours, the maintenance scripts will not run. By default, these are executed between 03:15 and 05:30 hours local time, depending on the script. UNIX systems run scheduled maintenance routines known as maintenance scripts to clean up a variety of System logs and temporary files. Mac® OS X is a UNIX ® -based system, built in part on both BSD® and FreeBSD ®.

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