in reply to Re: Cron on Mac OS X
in thread Cron on Mac OS X

Sorry about the double-posting -- I thought that had gone off somewhere else. I'm still trying to figure out how this site works.

I did some looking into launchd and it looked much more involved than setting up a crontab. That said, I still can't get this thing to work. To answer your question, I have not turned on crontab. How would I go about doing that?

Thanks.

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Re^3: Cron on Mac OS X
by JadeNB (Chaplain) on Sep 09, 2008 at 16:04 UTC
    crontab itself doesn't need to be turned on as such—it's used only to tell cron to use a particular crontab file. However, cron does need to be running in order to know to do anything. I don't know about Leopard, but, on Tiger, cron is started up by launchd in response to a file called com.vix.cron.plist in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons. (That file records the path, tells it to RunAtLoad, and gives it WatchPaths and a QueueDirectory, which are /etc/crontab and /var/cron/tab, respectively.)
      On OS X 10.5, cron should be running by default. I just did a fresh install a few months ago, and didn't have to do anything to activate it.