find, tr, sort, perl ????

[arri]

Hi

what do the processes find, tr, sort, perl do, in this respective order, in the middle of the night (4 am).
i experienced this before and it could'v very well also've been at 4 am, that the computer is taken over by some background processes, cunsuming all cpu- and disk usage,
but this time i decided to see what was going on (instead of doing a restart) with Activity Monitor
and those were the 4 processes responsible, running the one after the other and dissapearing again.

i was installing software of a respected company, doing this the Finder and Dock crashed (or restarted?), the autorization of the software i was installing failed: not even a name/pass-dialog appeared..
i am convinced this was causes by these processes going on in the background, because after they finished all was fine again

anyone know what that was?
just curious

 

[Cheryl]

First, what OS version are you using?
Second, did you verify and repair permissions lately? Doing this, then installing should work.

 

[naodx]

well I don't know what the names of the processes are for sure, but that is around the time that the system runs its unix cron process.

Basically what cron does is run 3 different things, a daily cleanup, and weekly cleanup, and a monthly cleanup. They are scheduled by default to run late at night/early in the morning, when it is assumed that the computer is sitting idle.

Again, I'm not sure if this is related to what you seen for processes, as I've never viewed them while they are running.

As far as the software not installing, could have been a fluke, or maybe a bad install disk. I myself just recently had that problem with some software I had just bought and was trying to install. It wouldn't install right, so I called the manufacturer and they are sending me out a new disk to see if that takes care of the problem.

And yes, periodically running disk utility to repair permissions is a nice way to avoid some potential problems, but it isn't a cure all for every problem. I usually run it once a week, and after installing any type of software or upgrades.

 

[Anthony]

Hi

what do the processes find, tr, sort, perl do, in this respective order, in the middle of the night (4 am).

find - finds files on your drive
tr - substitutes/deletes characters in a string of text
sort - sorts things...
perl - perl is a scripting language, the perl process is the interpreter, it doesn't "do" anything on its own, you have to feed it a perl script..

With these commands combined it sounds like the system is searching for files, possibly removing/changing parts of the file names, sorting them into a list, and then doing something with them.

There are three scripts (daily, weekly, and monthly) that run automatically overnight on your computer that perform system maintenence like rotating logs and cleaning up junk files. My best guess is that would be why you are seeing these processes... its probably completely normal.

 

[Darkshadow]

Those are part of the weekly cron job. That particular sequence is, I believe, the locate database being updated.