cron jobs under mac os 10.6 snow leopard
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22-09-2019 - |
Question
I'm trying to set up an automated svn commit to run semi-hourly under mac os 10.6, but the crontabs i'm adding to cron don't seem to be valid and/or don't seem to even be looked at by cron. For testing i made a simple crontab and script:
Crontab:
*/2 * * * * /Users/username/crontest
where username is replaced with my system username, thus pointing to my home directory (and yes, those really are tabs between each value - they aren't faithfully reproduced in the code
section)
I'm running a crontab -r
first, then running crontab .mycrontab
that contains the above line. crontab -l
spits out the line above, and running ps -A | grep cron
shows /usr/sbin/cron
running, which I assume is the cron daemon under mac os x. The /Users/username/crontest
script is simply appending a line of text to a text file, as such:
echo "hi" >> /Users/username/crontest.txt
What gives? I'm stumped.
Solution
Oops...I was missing the newline character at the end of the cron job. That seems to have fixed it.
OTHER TIPS
Although the preferred method on OS X for running automated jobs is launchd, cron
is still supported. Chances are you have a permissions problems with your script; make sure it has execute permission.
Also, */2
means every two minutes, not semi-hourly. Try setting the minutes field with a list of minutes:
0,30 * * * * /Users/username/crontest
Works for me on 10.6.