Symantec “endpoint protection” (antivirus to you and me) came installed on my new work mac, and because I’m a subservient oik, I’ve not fettled with it before, but the updates have begun to irritate. Basically the updater seemed to be running on a schedule, resulting in a delightful bouncing ball in the dock every hour or so (certainly every time I restarted).

I found a fix over on symantec’s forums. open up a terminal window and you can edit the scheduling for all users on the box (as long as you have root permissions). Here are the magic words:

1

sudo symsched -l 

(Lists the current schedules)

1

sudo symsched -d all

(deletes all the current schedules)

1

sudo symsched LiveUpdate "Update All Daily" 1 0 -daily 07:17  "All Products" -quiet

(creates a new schedule, daily, with the quiet flag set).