Thanks for the suggestions. They are good ones.... but this is a single-user machine and I'm an old Unix guy so whether a file is owned by root or user, I know how to "work" the system.
I've been running the same script from the same place via cron on a Mac for six years now without a problem and so if it works, don't "fix" it... as they say.
I didn't want to move to launchd, but who is to say how long Apple will keep cron. According to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd Apple plans to dump it along with a bunch of other old Unix "stuff." Besides, Apple made launchd their brand of "open source" and it would not surprise me if some of the Linux distros pick it up and replace initd, atd, etc.
As for the script in question, all it does is grab a file and re-load a database... which I never use. We do all our production work on our dedicated web server (the so-called cloud) and I keep the local database just in case we lose connectivity or our server takes a hit... which has happend only once in the past seven years... for 90 minutes... since we changed to a server-side paradigm for our databases, banking, faxing, etc.
I suppose that if I ran tons of scriipts it would be a good idea to isolate them, but this is the only one we run locally. All our other scrips are on our FreeBSD server... we dump files and rsync them off to several off-site storate locations... just in case. We run/own the Jaya123 system order-entry/invoicing small-biz service www.jaya123.com which has gained a nice userbase over the past six years we've had it out. Obviously we need to keep our backups in multiple locations separate from weather, quakes, etc.
As for the data we keep locally, it is just for our small insurance agency biz... www.ancins.com and we don't keep any personal/confidential info on our servers like SSNs or medical data. It's just name/address and policy info which we need to access when clients call with questions.
Over the years I've learned to keep things simple and intuitive. I've been doing IT stuff for 30+ years... started with H. Ross Perot and EDS in 1975 so I'm not quite a newbie! I'm older than dirt! My wife says that if I were a lizard I'd be a belt by now! I don't think launchd is "simple" but it has more "horsepower" than cron does and I'll eventually get more used to it... maybe even learn to like it. However, for me the jury is still out as to how stable it is. One thing about cron, once you got it to work (which could be like root canal) it never failed. In the old days we had to install it ourselves... and while not as messy as postfix, it was almost always an all-nighter!
My objection is XML. I would have prefered a plain old config file... similar to php.ini or httpd.conf... there are tons of programs to parse those files and Apple could have used one... insead of an XML parser which by definition is problematic.
Anyway, that's the short answer . 😁
Al
www.ancins.com
www.jaya123.com
