OS X 10.4 and 10.5 fail to perform daily, weekly and monthly maintenance tasks as intended unless the computer is always switched on and never allowed to sleep. This is OK for permanently running servers but unsatisfactory for most computers which will never perform these important tasks. This results in databases being out of date and allows log files to grow indefinitely so that they unnecessarily occupy several GBs of disk space. This installer corrects the problem.
The Period installer installs a new plist file which ensures that OS X 10.4 and 10.5 maintenance tasks are initiated at intervals of 1, 7 and 30 days as originally intended.
An administrator password is required for install and uninstall. Maintenance tasks will be initiated immediately. They take several minutes to complete but it will do no harm to interrupt them by shutting down as they will restart automatically at the next login.
Maintenance activity is recorded in daily.out, weekly.out and monthly.out files at /private/var/log/. The new plist file adds a time stamp to the end of these files indicating when maintenance is due. This time stamp is compared with current time at install, login and once an hour thereafter while the computer is awake. Maintenance is initiated if a time stamp is out of date or missing. If a file is missing a new one is generated automatically.
The installer disables the original plist files at:
and installs a new plist file at:
The uninstaller reverses this process by deleting the new file and enabling the three original files.
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