John H
asked on
Unable to edit crontab in osx 10.6
When I'm in Terminal and use both "crontab -e" and "sudo crontab -e", all i get is the text above, and it is uneditable. How do i get past this? No luck so far with my searches.
Suggestions? Many Thanks!!
John
Suggestions? Many Thanks!!
John
Dunno, but you could try this: http://quicksilver.caup.washington.edu/software/Crontooie/
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OS X 10.5+ uses launchd: http://developer.apple.com/macosx/launchd.html
"In Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, Apple introduced a new system startup program called launchd. The launchd daemon takes over many tasks from cron, xinetd, mach_init, and init, which are UNIX programs that traditionally have handled system initialization, called systems scripts, run startup items, and generally prepared the system for the user. And they still exist on Mac OS X Tiger, but launchd has superseded them in many instances."
You should not use cron as of 10.5+ (!!)
"In Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, Apple introduced a new system startup program called launchd. The launchd daemon takes over many tasks from cron, xinetd, mach_init, and init, which are UNIX programs that traditionally have handled system initialization, called systems scripts, run startup items, and generally prepared the system for the user. And they still exist on Mac OS X Tiger, but launchd has superseded them in many instances."
You should not use cron as of 10.5+ (!!)
ASKER
Thanks bro... for whatever reason, I couldn't edit it with vim, so using "sudo pico crontab" worked. thank you!!
Ahh, the link to the article of the accepted answer is from _2002_ !!
It's wrong, it's old and YOU SHOULD NOT use cron under 10.6 (or 10.5 for that matter!).
I though I made that pretty clear with Apple's own words...
It's wrong, it's old and YOU SHOULD NOT use cron under 10.6 (or 10.5 for that matter!).
I though I made that pretty clear with Apple's own words...
ASKER
I guess the folks at Drupal got it wrong too, because it still relies on cron functions after install. To make it clear in Drupal's own words, look at http://drupal.org/cron.
To me, it seems as if Drupal just needs to have the 'cron.php' file loaded every hour. To me, that seems like a huge amount of times each day to run 'maintanence', but maybe it's not that much of a load.
Anyway, if the 'cron.php' file is made the right way, you should be able to load it directly, without using wget - if it's not, you need to load it via wget - but strange that there does not seem to be any authentication!
But the correct way, and system supported way, is to use launchd - not crontab.
I don't have a Drupal site to test on, but it should be quite easy to make a launchdeamon plist to do the job.
Have a look at Lingon: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19879/lingon
Anyway, if the 'cron.php' file is made the right way, you should be able to load it directly, without using wget - if it's not, you need to load it via wget - but strange that there does not seem to be any authentication!
But the correct way, and system supported way, is to use launchd - not crontab.
I don't have a Drupal site to test on, but it should be quite easy to make a launchdeamon plist to do the job.
Have a look at Lingon: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19879/lingon