With all of the news flying back and forth about Apple’s various iDevices, it’s refreshing to discover that utilities for Mac OS X haven’t gotten lost in the shuffle. One such disk maintenance utility, the open-source AppleJack, has finally been updated to work with Snow Leopard.
TUAW is reporting that Mac OS X Snow Leopard compatibility has been added to AppleJack 1.6, a popular free disk maintenance utility that runs at startup and performs a barrage of tasks, including repairing disks, repairing permissions, cleaning up cache files, validating preference files and removing swap files, as well as an auto pilot mode that does them all unattended.
The open-source AppleJack comes from developer Kristofer Widholm with assistance from Steve Anthony. Once downloaded and installed, it’s actually run by rebooting your computer into single-user mode (which is done by holding down the S and Command keys during startup) -- there is no graphic user interface for the software.
Before you balk at the lack of a GUI, keep in mind that a utility like AppleJack can only really do its magic when the computer isn’t fully booted into Mac OS X anyway. Apple doesn’t permit tasks such as disk repair from a startup disk, which is what makes AppleJack such a useful utility. Instead of having to boot from a separate hard drive or use paid software such as DiskWarrior which is often slow to be compatible with newer Mac models, AppleJack just works.
AppleJack 1.6 is absolutely free and can be downloaded directly from the open-source project website. You may not need it now, but it’s good to have it on hand in case trouble ever comes a-callin’…
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