applescript and cron

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

I am trying in vain to get cron to run AppleScripts. For the moment I just have a short script that opens access to a file, writes something to it and closes the file again. I can get the script to work from the command line, but it doesn’t appear to work from cron.

I have the script saved as an application bundle (at the moment, I have tried other options) . When I run it from the commandline as “open /testscript” (it is just on the root of the drive) I get a dialog box asking me whether to run or quit the script, which is undesirable. If I run the script as osascript /testscript the scripts completes successfully and without the dialog. Now I just need that to happen using cron.

I have editied the system crontab and added the command as osascript /testscript running as root and I have set the command to run a few times on every day at just a few minutes from when I save the script. For example, I put “16,17,18,19” in the first field if it is now 15 minutes after the hour with * for all the other date entries, hoping the script will kick in after I close the crontab and run 4 times. I have explicitly set permissions on the file to 755 thinking there might be a permissions issue, but no go.

If anyone has info to share on getting Applescript to play with cron I would really appreciate it.

Running the script on a G5 with 10.4.3

cheers

#2

if you saved the script as an application AND have the “Startup Screen” checked off - you’lle get a dialog box when it runs. Aslo - if you have a clean install of 10.43, and not an upgrade from 10.3 - Cron will not be availible - the new way to schedule jobs in 10.4 is with launchd.

#3

Hmm… not regarding the service used, crond or launchd, I’m not sure whether it will be possible to run this command from within a daemon.
The reason is, that osascript needs a connection to the window manager in order to be able to execute a script (this is related to the AppleEvent manager, not to the osascript application itself) - and when invoking it from cron or a similar service, this connection is not present.

However, I’m currently working on a project that will allow exactly this (invoking AppleScripts without an initial connection to the window manager). Launching itself works, but I still have to do some cleaning and so on before I will deploy the tool. I will post it here, when I’m done.

Best regards,
danB