Huntsville Macintosh Users Group
Repair Permissions Using a Cron Job Repair Permissions Using a Cron Job
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by Marius Schamschula, after a suggestion by Eric Cherry

Background

Any time you install new software or update existing packages with Apple's pkg installer system you may find that you computer becomes a little unstable. It does not need to be so. The standard solution is to run the Repair Disk Permissions function of Disk First Aid. Under Mac OS X 10.2x (Jaguar) this is part of the Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility). However, most of us forget to run this after an update...

So why not automate this? Mac OS X has a built in facility for doing just that: the cron daemon.

Installation

Step 1: Install the run-parts Script

If you haven't done this already, install the run-parts script.

Step 2: Install repairperm

After downloading repairperm, copy it to the appropriate /etc/cron directory. I recommend doing this at least once a week. Daily may be a bit much, however. We can copy the file from your download location using the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal). For example:

$cd location_of _repairperm
$sudo cp repairperm /etc/cron.weekly

That's it!

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