I found the most recent post on Daring Fireball’s Tiger Details list to be rather amusing, in a sort of “WTF?” way. Basically, the progress bar that appears during the startup process — which, as it turns out, doesn’t really measure anything at all — can be brought up by executing a Terminal command.

The fun part is that you can launch WaitingForLoginWindow at any time. Using Terminal, execute:

/usr/libexec/WaitingForLoginWindow

Up pops the “Starting Mac OS X…” progress window. It’s harmless, pointless, but kind of fun. To quit it, you can type killall WaitingForLoginWindow at the command line.

There is a semi-practical use here, though; as mentioned, WaitingForLoginWindow writes the number of seconds it displayed the progress bar during the most recent system boot to /var/db/loginwindow.boottime. Theoretically, you could chart this value over time to measure boot performance, and maybe fire off an email if it goes over a certain percentage (I’m thinking of 10.4 Server users here). Of course, there are probably better things you should be tracking on your own server, but what the heck, maybe you can use it to try to justify upgrading from that spare blue G3 in the machine room…

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