That cron, c-cron cron cron

[daveg]

I’m trying to lever crontab as a scheduling engine for my AppleScript Studio app. There’s a ton of info on the net (and in here) about generic crontab use, but I’m trying to address an underlying instability in my implementation: if my app writes to the crontab as the current user (which seems fair and works) the current user is capable of flushing the crontab and pulling the ground from under my app’s feet.

So, do you make a new user called ‘myApp’ and bung your jobs in there? If so, how do you make the new user as skeletal as possible (ie I don’t want an instance of myApp in the ‘Accounts’ System Preference pane.

Thanks, Dave.

[StefanK]

Hi,

as crontab is actually a launchd daemon in Tiger and Leopard,
it’s recommended to use launchd to schedule scripts, which is much more flexible than a simple crontab entry.

You can create agents and daemons both for a single user and globally