Wake Mac from sleep to run script in crontab

Did you try System Preferences > Energy Saver > Schedule..?
I have never tried this by myself so I'm not sure whether it works as expcted or not.

You don't need to be logged in from cron entries to work, but the machine can't be asleep.

If it's asleep, no processes are running, including cron, so it can't fire off your script.

Your best option is to use Energy Saver to wake your machine a few minutes before you want the backup to run. Your script can sleep the machine when it's finished.

An alternative that might work would be at. From memory, when the machine wakes, at will invoke scripts that should have run when the machine was asleep.

and X11 doesn't need to be running for the crontab entries to work. your machine just needs to be awake. try "at" or create a launchd plist to run the script upon machine wake, and you should be all set.

Long time since I posted here. For my macs, I installed anacron from Fink - it will run the 1/day, 1/week, etc. scripts anytime it is awake. Works like cron, but its for those scripts that you don't care when they run during the day.

I also moved the cron.daily scripts to run under anacron so the admin clean-ups always get run.

Now my G5 and my wife's iBook both get regular backups and I can worry about one thing less. You can read about it at http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031111110802488

Boyd