Caution: These are primitive tools that I designed for my personal use. They have not been fully tested and are offered here, as-is, simply as a courtesy.
Many programs place hidden files in your computers' filesystem. If these files become corrupt or outdated, they can be almost impossible to find. AccessTracker is a rough hewn program that identifies all files that have been accessed or modified since it was launched. To use it, first launch AccessTracker, then launch the suspect application. Wait for the suspect app to exibit the behavior that you're looking for, then have AccessTracker identify all accessed or edited files. AccessTracker is also useful for monitoring the behavior of an untrusted application.
One of my customers asked me to recover several thousand student AppleWorks documents that were inadvertantly deleted. I managed to recover the files, but many were damaged and all were without names. This program will take a folder of AppleWorks documents, determine which ones are salvageable, copy them to a new location, and rename them with the first four words of the document's text. (Since these were school papers, the first four words almost always contained the student's name.) The source code is included, as this program will likely require adaptation to fit your needs.
Apple's "AppleWorks File Repair Utility" is a drag-and-drop repair program for AppleWorks documents, but if you try to drop a large number of documents on it at once, it freezes. AWFilter is a front end that overcomes this limitation. Take your folder of damaged AppleWorks documents, drop it onto AWFilter, and AWFilter will feed the files into AppleWorks File Repair Utility, one by one. AWFilter has been successfully tested with a folder of 8,082 documents.
If you've ever copied a folder of LDAP home directories with Mac OS X Server, you've probably noticed the obscene amount of time that's spent copying cache files. If you have several thousand users, deleting these cache files before copying will likely save you hours. To do so, drag and drop a folder of user directories onto CacheRemove. This is simply a graphical front end to the command:
find "$2" -name '*.cache' -print0 | xargs -0 rm
This is a simple script that unloads and reloads CiscoVPN.kext. This is useful if Cisco Systems VPN Client is not working correctly, and particularly for fixing the error:
"Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem. Please make sure that you have at least one network interface that is currently active and has an IP adress and start this aplication again."
See also: Schnitz Remote.