OnyX: Make OS X Spill the Beans
Date: Apr 29, 2005
Leatherman as Metaphor
Most guys know what a Leatherman tool is; it's a multifunction gizmo that arranges most of the tools you routinely need into a foldable item that can be carried on your belt or in your pocket. It's physically big enough to do most jobs, but not so big that you can't have it available to you all the time. Now in the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that I carry the smaller "Micra" version of the Leatherman tool with me everywhere I go. It's proven to be just so doggone useful, I want it around and always within reach.
That's sort of what I think about OnyX. It's a freeware program from Titanium Software that is really an interface to the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X. You can access the tools that Unix provides and use them to get to a deeper understanding of what your computer is doing, which is especially helpful if you are trying to troubleshoot a problem. Like a Leatherman tool, OnyX pries open the maintenance side of OS X and helps you screw around with it.
What You Can Do with It
When it first shows up, OnyX is a toolbar that requires the system's password to activate it.
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Clicking Appearance brings up a dialog box with tabs that give you control over the appearance of core programs. Instead of having to munge around each of the programs, most of what you might want to specify is aggregated into one place.
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Maintenance, cleaning, and automation have overlapping functions but relate to using the file cleaning and rotation utilities built into Unix. Other programs have addressed using these functions before (notably MacJanitor and Cocktail), but OnyX gives you different ways to work with them in its dialog boxes. You might want to experiment with different workflows to see what works for you.
The Boring Stuff
The Unix utilities button brings up a number of tabbed functions in a dialog box.
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Choose the plutil tab to check your preferences for corruption. The man tab is actually a reference guide to Unix utilities because it displays the manual for a selected utility. This is awfully useful for the infrequent Command Line In Terminal user because the syntax and options used with utilities is always important but sometimes poorly remembered. The man tab is a great "cheat sheet" for most of the Unix utilities, so you can use them right the first time.
The locate tab will find a file for you, even if it is invisible in the Finder. The system_profiler tab gives the same information as Apple's, but a tad faster. Not much excitement there.
The Info button on the toolbar is just as boring. You can find the same information from the About This Mac menu and system profiler, but everything is aggregated into one dialog box.
So, when does the good stuff start?
The Not-So-Boring Stuff
I keep coming back to OnyX and using the Logs button. A lot. What Logs does for me is get me to all the logs that Unix keeps about itself automatically. Although the initial dialog box display looks empty, the fun begins when you select a menu.
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What you now have available is all the major logs associated with the system. If you select one, it will appear in the white space that is under the popup menus. The maintenance logs (daily, weekly, and monthly) can show you exactly what has happened when you ran those maintenance scripts. (Why use a maintenance script? For example, in Unix OS systems most temporary files have to be explicitly deleted. If not, they just stay there like dead wood and eat up your disk space. You can delete them easily as a batch with a daily maintenance script.)
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Console is all the system events that get reported. All these system-level logs are followed in the menu by the logs for the BSD subsystem programs such as Apache, Samba, PPP, and the like. These logs are a great way to see whether the subsystems are having problems.
The Applications popup menu brings up a file selector, with which you can select the report produced from an application. Here's the report produced by an application (SMARTReporter) that checks my hard drive every hour for any predicted failures using the drive's built-in hardware tests.
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Pretty simple text output—with just the time and results included. It's also very understandable. Even a machine could parse it.
Let's try another one. The backup utility SuperDuper offers you a choice about which files it won't copy though the use of a simple script editor. If you suspect a file corruption problem is happening on your backup disk, looking at the SD log is the best way to see exactly what did happen during that last file backup, as opposed to what you thought you told it to do.
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Summary
The capability to easily call forth a needed log is what gives OnyX its unique value to me when I use it. Of course, I use the logs a lot. Not everyone will. Others will just want to use it as a way to view command manuals. It's got it all there.
OnyX's aggregation of disparate tools can make it useful in the same way a Leatherman multitool is useful. If you've never run a maintenance script, you can use OnyX to do so. If you run daily maintenance scripts, you can use OnyX to automate those scripts. There's something there for everyone. You just have to seek it out.