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launchd scheduling woes (and cron to the rescue!) #

One of the Unix features touted in Tiger is launchd, which is supposed to replace cron (among many other things).

However, I simply could not get scheduling to work after several hours, even though StartCalendarInterval was reportedly fixed in 10.4.2 (I'm running 10.4.3). Here are some of the resources I used:

Webpages and documentation:

• An Introduction to Tiger Terminal, Part 5
• All About launchd Items (and How To Make One Yourself)
• launchd in Depth
• Wikipedia article
• Getting Started with launchd
• cron jobs with launchd

Plist editors:

• Lingon (by the authors of the best GUI text editor for OS X: Smultron)
• Launchd Editor
• PlistEdit Pro

The ultimate solution? Going back to cron (via the insanely helpful CronniX). Cron and CronniX accomplished in 3 minutes what launchd could not do in 3 hours.

P.S. Until today, I never imagined I'd find myself praying for the Windows Task Scheduler ;-)

/mac | Nov 27, 2005

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