What does this terminal command do?

[Frisco]

open the terminal ...and write
sudo periodic daily.....press enter
sudo periodic weekly.... press enter
sudo periodic monthly ...press enter

I saw this on another post in Macrumors, but they didn't say what it did.

Any know?

Thanks

[JamesDPS]

It runs executable files in a given directory at the interval supplied (daily, weekly, etc). In terminal do a "man periodic" to see the entire description.

[jeremy.king]

periodic is a program responsible for launching maintenance scripts (or your own scripts) for your mac.

This is usually handled by cron, but your machine must be on and running and sometimes people just want to run them at will. so...Running those commands in terminal will execute the daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance scripts as defined in /etc/periodic/daily, /etc/periodic/monthly, and /etc/periodic/weekly

[sinbushar]

overnight panther runs scripts to take care of the little things...just like janitorial clean up...but since they run at like 3 am, and not everybody is up that late...or has their computer up that late..you can run them manually

another option is a clever little application called MacJanitor

hope this helps

[schatten]

Will those scripts run even if the Mac is on but in "deep sleep" mode?

I don't ever turn my Mac off, but it does sleep when I do :)

So, at 3:00am, whilst I sleep, does my mac wake up, run the scripts, and go back to sleep? I have a pretty small apartment & I assume I'd hear the HDD spin up & never have, so I figure it doesn't, but I also figure that Apple doesn't expect people to leave their Macs running their fans, HDDs, & all that all night...

[wrldwzrd89]

Will those scripts run even if the Mac is on but in "deep sleep" mode?

I don't ever turn my Mac off, but it does sleep when I do :)

So, at 3:00am, whilst I sleep, does my mac wake up, run the scripts, and go back to sleep? I have a pretty small apartment & I assume I'd hear the HDD spin up & never have, so I figure it doesn't, but I also figure that Apple doesn't expect people to leave their Macs running their fans, HDDs, & all that all night...
Modern Macs will not wake from sleep to run automated scripts (controlled by cron). Here's a link for proof: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/anacron.html

[dudeami]

You can change the time that these maintenance scripts run by editing crontab.

[abhishekit]

You can change the time that these maintenance scripts run by editing crontab.
hey ...that was a neat tip dude...thanks...i changed it to 9 in the evening....most likely time that my machine wd be up...
cheers

[Westside guy]

Modern Macs will not wake from sleep to run automated scripts (controlled by cron). Here's a link for proof: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/anacron.html

Note that this is more than just proof the problem exists - anacron is a tool developed to solve the problem.