Getting started with cronjobs on a Mac

Question

I\'m trying to get familiar with cron jobs, and I think I get the basic idea (scheduling, syntax, etc), But, I can\'t seem to get it right on my mac with Terminal - where ex

Answer 1

To get started with launchd (instead of cron) you'll want to first create an empty .plist file, for example local.mytask.plist and put it somewhere. ~/Library/LaunchAgents is probably a good place. Open that in text editor and copy in the code below

KeepAlive

Label
local.mytask
ProgramArguments

/opt/local/bin/wget
http://someserver/somepage.php

StartInterval
300
RunAtLoad

StandardErrorPath
/dev/null
StandardOutPath
/dev/null

Then "activate" the file from the command line:

sudo launchctl load /Users/my_username/Library/LaunchAgents/local.mytask.plist

To make it load automatically, create a ~/.launchd.conf file with the same line (minus sudo launch)

load /Users/my_username/Library/LaunchAgents/local.mytask.plist

The above instructions above have been copied from www.davidlanier.com and reposted here for your reference.