4 Easy steps to keeping your Mac startup disc clean
- By Rodney Goldston
- Published 06/13/2008
Rodney Goldston
Rodney Goldston is an Entrepreneur, and Sales & Marketing expert with more than a decade of experience. He is also the owner of AskBigPapa.com.
Rodney currently serves older Americans as a Reverse Mortgage Specialist for the nations largest and most respected Reverse Mortgage Provider.
Your Mac operating system is built on the worlds most stable platform called UNIX®. Scheduled maintenance routines known as maintenance scripts run by default between 03:15 and 05:30 hours local time, depending on the script. These scripts clean up a variety of System logs and temporary files.
However, should your Mac be shut down or in sleep mode during these hours, the maintenance scripts will not run. This results in log files that will grow over time, consuming free space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
If you turn off your Mac each night, as I do, then you need to invoke these maintenance routines manually on a routine basis. Here 4 easy steps that will keep your hard drive clean.
Using your Admin account, you can execute all three maintenance scripts at once, as follows:
- Launch Terminal, in the Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities folder.
- At the Terminal prompt, type the following, exactly as written: sudo periodic daily weekly monthly
- Press Return.
- Type your Admin password when prompted, then press Return.
All three scripts will run in sequence. There is no visual feedback while the scripts execute. You will know they are completed when the Terminal prompt returns.
You can also run the scripts individually. For example, to run just the daily script, you would type the command:
- sudo periodic daily
in step 2 above.
