More information about maintaining Mac OS X can be found in our 'Maintaining Mac OS X' FAQ.
This FAQ, derived from our book Troubleshooting Mac OS X, provides: If your Mac is shut down or left in sleep mode overnight, the maintenance scripts should be run manually on a regular basis unless you plan on devoting a large portion of your hard drive to the files cleaned-up by these routines! This results in log files that will grow over time, consuming free space on your Mac OS X startup disk. If your Mac is shut down or in sleep mode during these hours, the maintenance scripts will not run.
By default, these are executed between 03:15 and 05:30 hours local time, depending on the script. UNIX systems run scheduled maintenance routines � known as maintenance scripts � to clean up a variety of System logs and temporary files. Mac® OS X is a UNIX ® -based system, built in part on both BSD® and FreeBSD ®.
