Mac OS X software: Macaroni
From: Chris
LiscioWhen you listed must-haves
for a new laptop, I forgot to tell you
about Macaroni.When I had my iBook, it was starting to act very sluggish after
approximately one month – Spinning Wheels galore!Looking into the issue further, I learned that cron jobs scheduled for
times when your notebook is sleeping do not get run. Ever. This
included the daily, weekly, monthly, and “fix permissions” tasks that
normally need to run. I found Macaroni, which essentially handled
this issue. After one run of the
application (during which I forced
all scripts to run), it was much improved, and the problem never came
back.
I highly recommend it in case you run into the same problem. I once
read that this might have been solved in 10.3, but I still run it
anyway (since it’s essentially a nice GUI for cron).
Also note that you can (in 10.2 and later) run periodic
category in the Terminal, where
category is either daily, weekly, or
monthly, to achieve the same effect. But there’s always room
for a nice GUI on top of it all. (O’Reilly’s
MacDevCenter has a few other
Panther maintenance tips.)
Update: Trey points out:
<TreyB> You can find a couple of cron replacements that deal with this.
* dsandler doesn’t know how swappable os x’s cron is, but supposes it oughtn’t be that big of a deal
* dsandler notes that OS X seems to have vix cron
<TreyB> It runs along side of cron. And they have OSX support.