cron jobs under mac os 10.6 snow leopard

Question

I'm trying to set up an automated svn commit to run semi-hourly under mac os 10.6, but the crontabs i'm adding to cron don't seem to be valid and/or don't seem to even be looked at by cron. For testing i made a simple crontab and script:

Crontab: */2 * * * * /Users/username/crontest

where username is replaced with my system username, thus pointing to my home directory (and yes, those really are tabs between each value - they aren't faithfully reproduced in the code section)

I'm running a crontab -r first, then running crontab .mycrontab that contains the above line. crontab -l spits out the line above, and running ps -A | grep cron shows /usr/sbin/cron running, which I assume is the cron daemon under mac os x. The /Users/username/crontest script is simply appending a line of text to a text file, as such:

echo "hi" >> /Users/username/crontest.txt

What gives? I'm stumped.

Answer 1

Although the preferred method on OS X for running automated jobs is launchd, cron is still supported. Chances are you have a permissions problems with your script; make sure it has execute permission.

Also, */2 means every two minutes, not semi-hourly. Try setting the minutes field with a list of minutes:

0,30    *   * * * /Users/username/crontest

Works for me on 10.6.

Answer 2

Oops...I was missing the newline character at the end of the cron job. That seems to have fixed it.