10.3: Use Energy Saver to run system maintenance tasks

Dec 08, '03 11:00:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I don't know if this stating the obvious, but with the new Schedule feature in the Panther Energy Saver System Preferences panle, you can now set your machine to automatically turn itself on and off at any given hour. This is handy for running those 4am cron tasks if you don't want to rely on third pary apps such as MacJanitor or Cocktail.

[robg adds: Looking at the /etc/crontab file in 10.3, the daily task runs at 3:15am; the weekly task runs at 4:30am each Saturday, and the monthly task runs at 5:30am on the first day of each month. You could fairly easily use Energy Saver to have your machine wake up for the daily task, but if you wanted to cover the weekly and monthly tasks as well, you'd have to leave it on from 3:15am until probably 6:00am every day ... so it might make more sense to use one of the other tools to run the weekly and monthly tasks at different times.]

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