user cron job doesn't run

[shochatd]

I tried setting up a cron job for doing a nightly backup over the network,
and as far as I can tell, it just didn't run. crontab -l does show that
the job has been installed (no "you are not authorized" message). In other
Unix systems, I'm used to getting E-mail (via /var/mail) from the cron
daemon if there is a problem with a cron job, but this did not occur. How
can I get it to work (or debug it further)?
-- David

 

[shochatd]

Sorry to follow-up my own post, but here's why it didn't run. This is my first Mac in quite a while and I didn't realize that it by default goes to sleep all the time (after only 10 minutes or so of inactivity). I assumed that was just a laptop thing (this is an iMac). I noticed right away that I had to hit a key to wake it up, but I assumed (incorrectly) that it was just a screen saver quirk. Not surprisingly, if the Mac is asleep when the time designated in the crontab comes along, cron doesn't run at all and nothing happens. I turned off the sleeping via System Preferences/Energy Saver and now cron works fine. The solution was provided by someone over in macosxhints.com (Unix General forum).

 

[nixgeek]

Sorry for the late post, but you can disable this by going to System Preference and clicking on the Energy Saver pane. Once in there, set the sleep to Never if you don't need it to go to sleep.