AppleJack for Mac

By The Apotek Free Editors' Rating

Editors' Review

Download.com Staff Aug 16, 2010

Like a fire extinguisher by your stove or a lead pipe by your front door, AppleJack can be extremely useful to have in the right situation. This free command-line utility can help you do a small suite of essential Mac maintenance tasks, without needing an OS X install disk or secondary startup disk.

Don't be intimidated by hearing the words "command-line": if you already have AppleJack installed on your machine when you start up in Single User Mode (the only time you'll ever want to use AppleJack, by holding down command-s when you restart), you'll see a prompt asking you if you want to use AppleJack "for troubleshooting assistance." Then you'll be given a user-friendly list of basic maintenance options, including repair disks, repair permissions, cleanup cache files, validate preferences files, and remove swap files. These are all things that you can already do with the command line, or that you can do with Disk Utility if you're starting up from a secondary disk--but if you're traveling or otherwise don't have your install disks with you, AppleJack can be a lifesaver for getting an ailing machine up and running again. AppleJack supports Snow Leopard, and recent updates have improved the start-up process.

Like that lead pipe or fire extinguisher, though, AppleJack is not necessarily recommended for recreational use. A small number of users on some systems have experienced issues running this app, so there's no need to run AppleJack unless you are already having problems--and as always, make sure you have a backup of your hard drive.

Full Specifications

What's new in version 1.6

  • Snow Leopard compatibility [feature 2845796] (Thanks again to Steve Anthony)
  • Improved limits on output from syslog to STDOUT
  • Simplified startup of services on Leopard and Snow Leopard
  • Fixed bug in creation of user account lists in Snow Leopard where system accounts would show up
  • S.M.A.R.T. status verification is now being done in the expert mode. I still want to implement this using smartmontools, but for now diskutil will do.
  • Blessing of Mac OS X System folders on attached volumes is now possible. This is a primitive bless, ie, it does not create boot files, but simply blesses the chosen System folder and (optionally) sets it to be used for startup on next launch.

General

Release July 12, 2010
Date Added July 12, 2010
Version 1.6

Operating Systems

Operating Systems Mac OS X 10.4 PPC, Mac OS X 10.5 PPC, Macintosh, Mac OS X 10.4 Intel, Mac OS X 10.5 Intel, Mac OS X 10.6 Intel
Additional Requirements None

Popularity

Total Downloads 40,424
Downloads Last Week 2
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Developer's Description

AppleJack is a tool to make it easy to troubleshoot your Mac when no other startup disk is available to you. The script gives you an interactive menu-driven environment for basic disk check/repair, permissions repair, .plist validation, cache cleanup, and swap file removal. You can do basic system maintenance even if your GUI won't start up at all, simply by booting into single user mode, and typing 'applejack'.


Feedback: In order to make it easier for me to keep track of development of this application, please direct requests for enhancements and all bug reports to the sourceforge.net project page.


You can post features you'd like to see added at: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=79562&atid=557037
Bug Reports should be sent to: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=79562&atid=557034

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