On OS X's background maintenance tasks

I've always heard about these "background maintenance tasks" that OS X performs in its omniscient glory, but I never knew much about what they actually were or when they were performed. This weekend I finally did some digging and thought I'd post a few thoughts that might help give some Mac users insight into maintaining OS X beyond simple permissions repairs and emptying the trash.

In short, OS X is designed to periodically run various maintenance tasks such as purging log files and dumping hidden and temporary files. The only problem is that these tasks by default are scheduled to run early in the morning, when I'd bet most Mac users are sleeping. This odd task scheduling is a throwback to the days when computers were never shut off, even though a lot of computer users either shut their machines down or at least set them to sleep at the end of the day - especially notebook users.

So how can OS X still run these maintenance tasks and keep your Mac running squeaky clean, you ask? Well you have a few options:

1. Like a friend of mine, you could simply set your Mac to always be up and running, optionally sleeping itself after the maintenance task schedule specified in this Apple KnowledgeBase article. This certainly isn't an ideal solution if you own a portable and leave it in a bag often overnight.
   
2. You could use the simple Terminal instructions in this Apple KnowledgeBase article to run the tasks whenever you please. OS X's built-in schedule be damned!
3. If you're on Tiger you could use the Maintenance Automator action (which we here at TUAW love) to run OS X's built in maintenance tasks, as well as a few extras such as permissions repairing and preference file verifying.

These are hopefully a few simple and easy-to-implement options that will help keep your Mac running like brand new.

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