Huge daily.out doc

Yes, you can safely remove the /private/var/log/daily.out file. If you have somekind of "maintenance" program that you run then remove that too.

Mary Ries wrote:

Thanks, Mark. I will remove Daily.Out. I don't run a maintenance program. However, I periodically run the Repair Disk Permissions, and even more rarely run Repair Disk. Do either of these present a problem?

No, neither has any effect on daily.out. daily.out contains all the output from the shell scripts in the /etc/periodic/daily folder. Periodic runs these scripts and then send the output to daily.out. In any case it is unusual that your daily.out file has grow so large.

Mary Ries wrote:

Thanks, Mark. I will remove Daily.Out. I don't run a maintenance program. However, I periodically run the Repair Disk Permissions, and even more rarely run Repair Disk. Do either of these present a problem?

My comment on this is you should let the periodic daily, weekly, monthly run every once in a while. Because you haven't been running them is why you daily.out log got as large as it did. One of the jobs of the maintenance tasks is to rotate certain log files, keeping a few of the most recent compressed, and to minimize the size of others specifically from growing too large.

As for running repair permissions vs. repair disk, IMO you have your priorities backwords. Repair permissions is generally never needed. On the other hand it is best to more often verify your drives before any potential disk errors get compounded by further disk errors.

Mark Jalbert wrote:

No, neither has any effect on daily.out. daily.out contains all the output from the shell scripts in the /etc/periodic/daily folder. Periodic runs these scripts and then send the output to daily.out. In any case it is unusual that your daily.out file has grow so large.

Not unusual if you never do the periodic maintenance as I just said above.

"Because you haven't been running them is why you daily.out log got as large as it did."

I'm afraid that you are mistaken. Periodic maintenance does not compress daily.out nor does another mechanism within the operating system. If fact, most log maintenance is done by the newsyslog daemon and not within the periodic scripts.

Hmm, your right. Just looked at my daily 100.clean-logs script and periodic.conf and only daily_clean_logs_dirs is only defined for "/Library/Logs/CrashReporter". I stand corrected.

Mary Ries wrote:

I have deleted the daily.out log

I should have taken a peek at it first. My own daily.out goes back to the beginning of September and it is only 1.2MB. Assuming this as average use, extrapolating it to a whole year is somewhere between 3 and 4MB. Which means your log had enough in it for a whole geological era! Maybe something isn't quite right in your setup, and a look at the log might have given you a clue...

Mine is 13 months old and only 565KB. Keep the machine up over night (or at least past 3:30AM) and you will have a new daily.out log. Maybe post it.

Ok. FWIW, if the machine is sleeping at the designated scheduled time for a launchd item (periodic maintenacne tasks are now launchd's and not cron scheduled) then it will perform the task shortly after the machine wakes up. So it should be there by the time you go look for it.

Mary Ries wrote:

It is currently 3.7MB dating back to "Wed Dec 28 07:32:36 PST 2011". Does this size seem OK?

No. It's gigantic. Examine it with Console. You'll find it in Console's sidebar, under "Files". Something is filling it up, and it shouldn't.