Dear Apple: Fix launchd, document please?

[da]

Apparently, cron is deprecated in OSX 10.5.

K, fine. But its replacement, launchd, is a crappy replacement. It has no concept of time ranges (Or does it? Any mac folks with insight to share here?)

I want to replicate this crontab:


0,20,40 8-17 * * * /users/drallen/bin/thing.sh


So, run every 20 minutes between 8am and 5pm 5:40pm.

My preferred answer is to get my crontab entry working, but /var/log/system.log is reporting errors such as Mar 6 10:20:00 scsmac21 com.apple.launchd[1] (0x1000000.cron[64942]): Could not
setup Mach task special port 9: (os/kern) no access.

Googling finds reports of this same problem and error-message with no solutions offered.

[Edit to add: that error was actually a warning; hiding a $PATH problem that wasn't emailed to me as cron-job errors should be. :-P But it's working now, no help from the OS...]

Google also finds a pile of howtos for launchd from 2005-2006, saying "well, it's not as flexible as cron, but give it time, it's only 1.0." Apple, fix your software!

...I guess I'm stuck with dropping the "8am-5pm" part of it, and writing a launchd plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>scsmac21</string>
        <key>UserName</key>
        <string>drallen</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>/usr/bin/some_program</string>
                <string>param1</string>
                <string>param2</string>
        </array>
        <key>StartInterval</key>
        <integer>300</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

There, isn't that so much easier?... :-P

Bleh.

Comments

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

Depricate cron?

I was also thinking that ls, rm, and ln are really kinda old concepts and should be replaced.

Oooh, and while we're at it, let's revamp grep to take completely new and different parameters.

This will help with usability, where usability is equivalent to proprietary offshoots of commonly used functionality to make Mac users more separate from other communities.

Grumbly, grumbly.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Yeah. That.

As for different grep parameters, at least we're sort of used to that with Solaris/GNU/whatever differences.

Cute userpic. :)