Foire aux questions et conseils d'utilisation

Est-ce que CronniX sera disponible en Open Source

Oui. Depuis la version 1.5 CronniX est disponible en Open Source. Je ne parviens pas toujours à empaqueter la dernière version en OpenSource immédiatement, cependant. Demeurer avec moi.

Qu'est-ce que je dois faire pour démarer cron ?

Cron est une opération de système qui fonctionne déjà. Tout que vous devez faire pour programmer vos tâches est d'enregistrer les modifications dans un crontab. Cron regarde tous les fichiers chaque minute et démarre les tâches en suspens.


Comment est-ce que je sais si mon crontab fonctionne ?

Cela peut être difficile d'installer un crontab parce qu'assez souvent vous avez certains scripts qui fonctionne très bien sur la ligne de commande, mais échoue si appelé par le cron dû à l'environnement d'exécution qui diffère. La sortie des cron est envoyé par courrier électronique devient pratique au propriétaire des crontab.

Ce qui suit s'applique à OS X 10.1 et antérieur. Voir ci-dessous les instructions pour Jaguar.

Afin d'obtenir le courrier local vous devez définir un compte de courrier spécial dans Mail.app. C'est un truc provenant de www.macosxhints.com:

"An easier way"
Authored by: frjo on Tue, May 8 at 11:05AM

You don't need to have sendmail running for delivery of local mail, so this is basically all you need to do to get local (and therefore cron's) mail. While you're at it you can also create a forward of root's mail to your account. You do this by creating a file called ".forward" with your short user name in it in root's home directory "/private/var/root".

The following applies to OSX 10.2 (Jaguar)

It seems like the 'Unix mail account' account type has disappeared from Mail.app's account setup options in Jaguar. Unless you reinstalled, the old 'UNIX:' type entries in ~/Library/Mail/ are still there but they're ignored.

Here's how we can get a look at local mail again:

Test: Caveat:

Reading mail like that works and the change sticks unless you delete mail from your local inbox. When you do that, Mail replaces the link to /var/mail/ with a plain mbox file again. You have to reestablish the link to get your local mail again.

There's this tool cron that could schedule a script to check if 'mbox' is still a link or should be relinked... :-)


How do I know if a task triggers at the intended time?

Either you set up the mail account as described above and generate some output with your script/program or you test it by touching a test file from your script: "touch /tmp/crontest". You can then look at the timestamp of this file to see if your task was triggered.

A quick test if cron is working can be made by dragging and dropping a program like TextEdit on CronniX' main window. Set the time a minute ahead wait for it to pop up.


My crontab is screwed up and CronniX won't read it anymore. What can I do?

Use the following command in the terminal to get a look at your crontab:
crontab -l
(That's a lower case ell there)

If you want to remove your crontab to start from scratch do:
crontab -r

To save your crontab to a file that you can edit with a text editor, run
crontab -l > ~/my_crontab
This will 'pipe' the crontab to the file 'my_crontab' in your home directory.

After you've edited 'my_crontab' (be careful to use 'Plain text' if you're editing it with TextEdit, RTF format will not be cron's friend), you can install it with
crontab ~/my_crontab

This is cron in a nutshell. I hope you don't dispose of CronniX now that you know it.


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