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I've been trying to run my periodic daily weekly monthly on macOS 15.0 Sequoia, without success. Even the /etc/periodic/ folder disappeared.

Does anyone know what happened? How can I run these scripts again?

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2 Answers 2

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Sequoia has removed periodic, which has been deprecated for well over a decade.

The old daily, weekly and monthly scripts were scheduled by launchd for some years (between Sonoma and Ventura at least); but they have finally been removed from Sequoia.

Many of the tasks haven't been necessary for many years, e.g. cleaning fax temp files.

what does each one of the Sudo Periodic options do?

If you have your own tasks that you want to schedule, they should use launchd.

Here's a link to documentation about launchd.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/terminal/apdc6c1077b-5d5d-4d35-9c19-60f2397b2369/mac

(cron has been similarly deprecated, but is still present, though disabled by default.)

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    Thanks for that last line. I have a crontab entry, I'll need to re-enable cron when I uppgrade. I know I could turn it into a launchd item, but that's more work.
    – Barmar
    Commented Sep 20 at 14:24
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    @barmar I have been forcing myself to use launchd more even though I prefer cron. Yes it's more work and harder to memorize, but I think it's important to get some practice with it.
    – barbecue
    Commented Sep 20 at 17:13
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    @barbecue I've used launchd for other things. But for a one-liner that just runs every N minutes, cron is so much simpler. :)
    – Barmar
    Commented Sep 20 at 17:28
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AIUI, Periodic is (or was) an element of launchd. However AFAIK cron remains available, although using it requires some intervention:

Open System Settings, go to Privacy & Security, and then to Full Disk Access. If cron is listed, enable it. If it's not listed, click the + at the bottom of the list and add /usr/sbin/cron - or whatever location it's been moved to; you can learn this by entering whereis cron in the Terminal CLI.

If you decide to stick with the more capable, but also far more complex launchd, I'll make a suggestion: Buy a license for LaunchControl. FWIW: I've used it for years.

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