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j-a-x

macrumors 68000
Original poster
I remember with Panther and Tiger I was told to occasionally leave my Mac on overnight so that the cron jobs that clean out the system log files could run... either that or I was supposed to run a program to clean the logs manually. I was wondering if this was still the case in Leopard? Do the system cleaning cron jobs only run at night, or has Apple addressed this issue? (maybe they could run at startup instead, or in Disk Utility?).
 
Yes, you should still leave your Mac on overnight occasionally so it can run through its maintenance scripts. I also believe that the launchd daemon will run some of these scripts when the system wakes up from sleep if you had it in sleep mode all night but I'm not sure about it.

You could try a utility like Onyx to run the scripts if you're that worried about them running.
 
Thanks for you reply. I'm interested to know if the tasks will run on wake from sleep. That would eliminate the need for a utility like Onyx. Just curious...
 
Thanks for you reply. I'm interested to know if the tasks will run on wake from sleep. That would eliminate the need for a utility like Onyx. Just curious...
The daily maintenance script runs when resuming from sleep (if the system was in a sleep state when the script was scheduled to run), which clears a few caches and turns over (clears) some log files.
 
You can use MacJanitor to run the commands at anytime (or look up the terminal commands if you really want). There are a few more options that does the same. Search on macupdate or versiontracker.

Macaroni also does it, automatically.
 
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