Questions (from a newbie) about Cocktail

[florencevassy]

Can someoone please answer some questions that I have about Cocktail? I use it mainly to clean the cache and repair disk permissions.

What does it mean to...
Delete all rotated log files?
Choose symbolic link?
Delete DS store files?
Update Prebinding?

Thanks !

 

[florencevassy]

Can someone please help?

Can't anyone who knows about one or two of these items please answer?
Thanks so much! FV

 

[mkrishnan]

What does it mean to...
Delete all rotated log files?
Choose symbolic link?
Delete DS store files?
Update Prebinding?

1) When the system runs daily maintenance tasks, it takes certain log files and rotates them out -- that is, so that the files won't get too big or overwritten, it renames them to another filename, so that they can be saved. So the first thing gets rid of them.

2) Not sure, but a symbolic link is like an alias or like a shortcut in windows. So if you have an external drive, and you wanted to store your Music folder in it instead of on your notebook, then you could replace the Music folder with a symbolic link to the one on the ext hd. But I'm not sure what this option in your software does.

3) .DS_Store files are how MacOS saves options specific to a folder. Read this, from here

The .DS_Store files are created by the Macintosh OS X Finder. The these files keep track of folder view options, icon positions, and other visual information about folders.

When a new directory is accessed using the OS X Finder, a .DS_Store file will be created in that directory. Once the directory is viewed using the Finder a .DS_Store file will be permanently created in that directory. Currently, the option to create a .DS_Store file can not be disabled.

Users should be concerned about .DS_Store files being uploaded to the web servers. Since .DS_Store files contain some vital folder information they can be exploited to obtain information about system configurations.

4) Prebindings are associations between library files and applications. If they are prebound, the app is able to access the library more quickly. I believe that when the software updater tells you it is optimizing system performance, right before it asks you to reboot, it is doing this (but not when it doesn't ask you to reboot). I added it to a maintenance script, but you probably don't need to do it terribly frequently.

Hope that helps?

 

[florencevassy]

Cocktail

Thanks for your response !