Does Snow Leopard take care of cron sripts?

Hi Peter,

If you leave your Mac on during 3:15 and 5:30am (not in Sleep mode), the cron tasks will be run.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2319






Carolyn 🙂

Is this too simple of a solution or would resetting the clock to say, 3:00 AM and letting it run for a while accomplish the same thing? (setting for 3:00 when it is actually in the afternoon when the comp is on)

It must on from 3:15AM to 5:30AM not in Sleep mode. Check the link I posted.

Cron tasks run on any Mac left on between those hours regardless of the date of that article.

There's another way to run maintenance and that's to use iStatPro. Very handy widget
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/istatpro.html

iStat can run cron tasks for you anytime AND tell you when they were last run. It isn't necessary to run cron tasks more than once a month on a Mac.











Message was edited by: Carolyn Samit

I haven't installed Snow Leopard yet, but I doubt that it is much changed from Leopard.

First, there are no "cron" scripts. Apple stopped using cron years ago. Since Tiger, these scripts are scheduled using a new service called launchd.

If your machine is up long enough, they will run automatically. Your machine does not have to be awake at any scheduled time. If you shut down your machine every night, they won't run -- but in that case there is no reason to run them at all. For most users, these scripts don't do anything significant until the machine has been up for at least 3 days continuously. That is really the point of these scripts -- to take care of things if the machine hasn't been restarted in a long time.

There is no reason to do anything at all, except to let these tasks take care of themselves.

Apple no longer uses Cron to run those scripts. They are run by launchd and will run the next chance the computer gets to run them.

My computer sleeps all night, this is my current daily.out time stamp: Sat Sep 5 07:04:30 CDT 2009
As you can see, it ran the daily script as soon as I woke it up.

While I don't think Apple will deprecate cron, launchAgents and daemons are the current method-du-jour. Lingon, while no longer being actively developed, will help create these very easily. I think it will be a while before Apple changes things so severely that Lingon's scripts won't work.

Jeffrey,

I have a late model iMac running 10.6

It runs cron tasks between 3:15 and 5:30AM in my time zone.

It worked in Tiger/Leopard and does in Snow Leopard.








Carolyn

Carolyn Samit wrote:
It must on from 3:15AM to 5:30AM not in Sleep mode. Check the link I posted.

Not so. If your Mac is in Sleep mode during those hours, the scripts will run when the Mac wakes. I have Maintidget, a widget that reports when the scripts run, and it reports the times that the daily, weekly and monthly scripts have run, even though I always Sleep my MacBook overnight. I never force the scripts to run and never leave it on during the noted hours.

Bob N.

Carolyn Samit wrote:
It must on from 3:15AM to 5:30AM not in Sleep mode.

This is wrong and has been oft discussed before.if the computer is asleep overnight it will run the scripts when you wake it in the morning. let's not start the same old discussion again. more to the point, jeffrey is quite right that those periodic scripts are mostly useless and have been made even more so in snow leopard because rebuilding locate database was removed from the weekly script. running them by hand or installing some software to do them is a serious waste of time.
here is a good description (by jeffrey) of what those periodic scripts do
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8906776#8906776

Message was edited by: V.K.

Carolyn, if your Mac is running SL is running cron scripts, then you must have put them there. Cron is for all intents and purposes deprecated by Apple.

The launchd daemon runs the same maintenance scripts that cron once did, two OS's ago. Launchd is set up to run its tasks at the next opportunity following the scheduled time.

daily, weekly, monthly are all run by launchd. They are not cron scripts. If you go to the terminal and type crontab -l, or sudo crontab-l, you will get nothing.

I rarely do +"me too"+ posts or venture into waters that more technical fish than I swim in! I must, however, chime in and agree with several posters that maintenance scripts run even if the Mac is asleep at night (like mine). The scripts will run when you wake the computer.

Barry