Leopard user crontab! - Page 2

Whitehill · #9 November 28th, 2007, 03:57 PM

It took me most of the day to research how this works. The ultimate daemon is launchd which runs cron and at periodically. That said, I still can't explain why jobs for some users get run, for others they get ignored.

Whitehill · #10 November 29th, 2007, 04:48 AM

I have eliminated a lot of the clutter from the console log. The following may have something to do with my cron problems:

Code:

11/29/07 5:40:00 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (0x1121b0.cron[8270]) Could not setup Mach task special port 9: (os/kern) no access 
11/29/07 5:40:00 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (0x110b30.cron[8271]) Could not setup Mach task special port 9: (os/kern) no access

Anyone know what this means?

Whitehill · #11 November 29th, 2007, 12:59 PM

I got rid of the log entries. First, remove this line from user whitehill's crontab:

Code:

*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/some_program param1 param2

That is, run the program every 5 minutes every day.

Now, create the file /Library/LaunchAgents/net.home.some.whitehill.plist with contents

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>net.home.some.whitehill</string>
        <key>UserName</key>
        <string>whitehill</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>/usr/bin/some_program</string>
                <string>param1</string>
                <string>param2</string>
        </array>
        <key>StartInterval</key>
        <integer>300</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

Then run

Code:

launchctl load /Library/LaunchAgents/net.home.some.whitehill.plist

Wow! Isn't that so much simpler and easier?