I’ve used CronniX for a while to set-up crontabs for launching AppleScripts overnight. I’ve preferred it to messing at the command-line. I’m aware of launchd, but been using cron for a while and it always seems more straightforward to use CronniX (maybe someone can point me to a good GUI utility for launchd?).
But when I was upgraded to Leopard, my cron jobs stopped working. 5 scripts that run in the wee hours while I sleep no longer run. Scripts work fine when launched manually. Crontab still looks fine in CronniX.
I don’t think Apple depricated cron yet, so maybe something else happened? Any ideas?
Take a look at Lingon for using launchd
So pardon the digression, but launchd works by a separate file for each “action” you want to automate?
If so, I remember why I preferred crontabs…I like to see all my actions at once so I juggle timings around immediately realize when I have conflicts. launchd looks painful from that point of view…at least via Lingon anyway. Anything that shows it in a “here’s what’s scheduled daily” kind of format like Cronnix (tried to give a link to the Cronnix site for examples but their site is bogged)?
cron is actually a “subprocess” of launchd in Leopard
For each line in cron you need a single launchd.plist file.
The syntax looks weird at the first view, but it’s not that complicated.
Caution: The paths must be absolute, ~/Desktop/. doesn’t work.