Mac OS X does a little housecleaning in batch processes that run daily, weekly and monthly. These are kicked off by LaunchDaemons that reside in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons and are called com.apple.periodic.daily.plist, com.apple.periodic.weekly.plist and com.apple.periodic.monthly.plist. These need to run and so should not be disabled outright. However, they can disabled temporarily, as when you need a somewhat process intensive script to run for a few days. Therefore, we need a way to disable these and re-enable them. One could just move those files, but there’s actually a more graceful way. Running defaults read against one of the property lists can be done as follows: defaults read /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.periodic-daily We could use defaults to…