Where I work, there is a pretty length bureaucratic process involved with buying computer software.  When I read about an interesting tool or utility, such as Atomic Bird Software's "Macaroni", Kristofer Szymanski's "Cocktail", and the like, I could see the value they provided but realized I would never be able to get them in-house without a major effort.  This caused me to look into alternative ways of doing the things these utilities offered.

The "Macaroni" tool, for example, makes sure that certain UNIX system maintenance tasks get run on OS X systems when they're in use.  I was able to resolve that problem by simply making sure that Mac users here at work generally leave the machines on at night.  That left only the "repair permissions" function of Macaroni unavailable to me.  I resolved that by creating a script to run the Disk Utility from the command line to repair disk permissions each night.

The "Cocktail" product performs a lot of different maintenance and repair functions.  From what I was able to determine from the Mr. Szymanski's web site, the main functions are:

• Enable or disable journaling on disks - I developed a short script to do this through Disk Utility, though it's simple enough to do from the command line that it's really unnecessary.
• Repair disk permissions - I created a script to do this and used cron to run it nightly.
• Set disk spindown time - I created scripts to do this, though it's simple enough to do from the command line that it's really unnecessary.
• Prebind and re-prebind entire system or selected folder - I created a script to do this and run it regularly.
• Run cron scripts - All the scripts I setup through cron can be run by cron or run manually at any time.  The scripts OS X runs automatically on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis can be easily run by logging in as "root", bringing up a Terminal window, and entering "sudo periodic daily", "sudo periodic weekly", or "sudo periodic monthly" (respectively) at the command line.
• Change startup mode and language - I haven't a need to do this, so I haven't tried to script it.
• Modify sleep settings - I rarely have a need to do this after a machine is deployed.  If I did, I'd SSH into it and use the "pmset" command on the command line.  If you aren't familiar with "pmset", bring up a Terminal window and type "man pmset" to get a description of the command and its many options.
• Force empty trash -
• Rebuild Launch Services database - I created a script to do this as part of my weekly maintenance routine and on-demand as needed
• Update whatis and locate databases - The "whatis" and "locate" databases are handled in the "/etc/weekly" script that OS X runs automatically.  Running that script ("sudo periodic weekly" from a Terminal command line) is one of the easiest ways to do this.
• Delete locked or inaccessible items - Logging in as "root" and deleting such files from the Finder or command line is easy enough to do that I haven't tried to script this.
• Delete invisible DS Store files - I created a script to do this as needed.
• Clean system, user and Internet caches - I created a script for the system caches, the user caches, and Internet browser caches
• View, rotate, print and save logs -
• Create symbolic links - This is easy to do through the command line so I didn't bother scripting it.
• Recreate Mac OS 9 Desktop alias -
• Lock or unlock files and folders - To lock down certain applications and folders we don't want our users to access, I have scripts that run nightly to ensure that they remain locked down.
• Change speed, duplex and MTU Network settings -
• Optimize network settings for eight most common types of connections or apply the custom optimization -
• Configure the Mac OS X file server -
• Customize look and features of Finder, Dock and login window - The free "LoginWindow Manager" from Bombich Software takes care of the login window customizations I wanted.  I haven't had a need to customize the look and features of the Finder or Dock yet.
• Modify hidden settings of Exposé, Mail, Safari and other applications -
• Easily optimize your system - I created a script to perform the most common optimizations and set it up via cron to run regularly.
• Schedule maintenance tasks - OS X takes care of its own maintenance scripts on a regular basis, other than the scripts I've created, which are configured via cron to run at times when the users typically aren't in the office using their Macs.

There are some other features of Cocktail as well, but after reading what I could about it I didn't feel any of them were necessary to perform in our environment.