Technocrank

Google Software Update, which vexes system purists everywhere since it’s installed silently when you install certain Google products, is set by default to autonomously execute on a daily basis.  In Mac OSX, there’s no control panel or preference pane with which to change this annoying behaviour unlike in Windows.

However, I just found this page tucked away which describes how to set the update frequency for OSX (Windows users look here).  You have to get into Terminal and:

$ defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval <frequency>

…where <frequency> is in seconds.  Setting it to 0 (zero) disables it completely.

If you want to manually run an update check, you need to look in either

• /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/
• ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/

for a file called ‘CheckForUpdatesNow.command’ and run that.  Convenient, huh?

If I get the time, I might hack together a Pref Pane for this.