Crontab Under Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

November 8th, 2007 at 8:05 am (Mac OS X, sysadmin)

Beware - if you use crontab and are upgrading to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), your existing crontab files will be DELETED by the upgrade!**(actually only moved & disabled - see comments) Back ‘em up first (yeah, I know you should always do a backup before upgrading, but this is really the only issue I found).

Also note that Leopard’s firewall seems to let everything through by default, even if that’s not what you previously had your firewall set to do.

8 Comments

  1. Jacques Distler said,

    November 9, 2007 at 7:36 am

    Not strictly true. All your crontab files are still there in /var/cron/tabs/ . They’re just no longer USED.

  2. wickedlush said,

    November 9, 2007 at 9:33 am

    Thank you, Jacques - that is interesting… I can see that /var/cron/tabs/ does indeed contain my old files, but I have since created new (and slightly different) crontabs - do you know where the new crontabs are stored?

  3. Jacques Distler said,

    November 9, 2007 at 2:22 pm

    I was hoping you were gonna tell me.

    Then I was hoping you were going to explain the proliferation of messages like:

    Nov 9 16:20:00 golem com.apple.launchd[1] (0×11e900.cron[10402]): Could not setup Mach task special port 9: (os/kern) no access

    in my system logs.

  4. James said,

    November 30, 2007 at 9:20 am

    In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the new crontabs are in /usr/lib/cron/tabs

  5. wickedlush said,

    December 3, 2007 at 9:03 am

    Thanks, James!

  6. Asteroid » Blog Archive » Backing up a 1&1 root server said,

    December 4, 2007 at 11:59 am

    [...] to me, doing an “upgrade” install of Leopard empties out the crontabs of all users, stashing copies in /var/cron/tabs. This deactivates your jobs without warning. This means that the [...]

  7. Tyler said,

    December 5, 2007 at 3:40 am

    You shouldn’t use cron anymore. It was deprecated in 10.4 Tiger and superseded by launchd.

  8. wickedlush said,

    December 6, 2007 at 8:48 am

    Not *another* thing to learn…? Brain’s full :-)

    OK - here’s one of many good resources online:

    http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/all_about_launchd_items_and_how_to_make_one_yourself

    Thanks, all

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