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

Cron has been replaced by launchd since 10.4. You should probably write your tasks using this unless you plan on porting them to Linux/Unix systems at some point.

If you do decide to go with cron anyway, try typing crontab -e or sudo crontab -e. These will give you different crontab files, the former for the user you're currently running as and the latter for the root user.

"Hitting" a URL can be accomplished a lot of ways. Depending on the local script that you are using to "hit" it, you could use some of the language's built-in methods/classes. For instance, a Ruby script would use net/http but you could try curl as well if you're just writing a bash script. Do man curl to find out more, but the basic command is just curl http://google.com.