New Mac? Sweet! Lets talk cron!

[witeshark]

One thing that new-to-Mac might want to be aware of is cron task. A running Mac up (not asleep) will do this itself somewhere between 0300 - 0600 -morning. Mine is never on then, so manually I do this sudo sh /etc/daily and each week, the weekly and each month the monthly. sudo is -switch to root (prompt for admin password). run as root, you don't need to use sudo. All other app should be closed! A good way to make sure of that is to log off and log back on. Finder > Applications > Terminal type sudo sh /etc/daily and so on.

 

[Brown Study]

Or you could download MacJanitor, a shareware app that uses a graphical interface to do the job, for people like me with a neurotic aversion to command lines.

What does 'cron' mean, anyway?

 

[shadov]

I think cron refers to chronology... Anyway it's the name of the program that sits in the background in almost every Unix system and runs task at specific times according to instructions in /etc/crontab.

You could also edit your crontab file and change the timings of these tasks.

 

[witeshark]

I think cron refers to chronology... Anyway it's the name of the program that sits in the background in almost every Unix system and runs task at specific times according to instructions in /etc/crontab.

You could also edit your crontab file and change the timings of these tasks.

Yup, all true, some have aversion to command line, I have aversion to 3rd party apps, but they do work!