Mac crontab is never created. I am trying to setup a cron on my mac, but it seems that it never finishes creating a crontab for my user. I open terminal and enter. On traditional unix systems, vi is the default editor; it looks like Mac OS X has kept that tradition. Set the EDITOR and VISUAL environment variables to the name. Also, rather than use crontab -e (with an editor directly), I suggest that you SAVE your crontab in a file on disk, by entering command crontab -l > my_cron.orig. However, I was never able to get crontab to work under Mac OS X 10.6, so. In this tutorial I’ll go with Apple's suggestion and show you how to run your Unix shell scripts and commands with the MacOS launchd facility using the launchctl command. Click here: to return to the 'Using the 'cron' scheduler' hint. When you save your changes it will then parse the crontab you have set up and warn you if there are any obvious errors in it. Man crontab man 5 crontab man vi [| #] Using an external text editor for crontab. Mac OS X Hints; iPhone Central. How to set cron jobs for InfiniteWP, when using MAMP on Mac OS X December 2, 2014. Note that if you are not using MAMP’s default 8888 port, you should leave that off. Then edit crontab again and change the curl command to your preferred time, either */20 or */5.

Active1 year, 4 months ago

I would like to use cron on my Mac. I choose it over launchd, because I want to be able to use my new knowledge on Linux as well. However, I cannot seem to get the crontab -e command to work. It fires up vim, I enter my test job:

But after saving and quitting (:wq),

says:

What am I doing wrong?

kenorb

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mollerhojmollerhoj

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10 Answers

Just follow these steps:

In Terminal: crontab -e.
Press i to go into vim's insert mode.
Type your cron job, for example:
Press Esc to exit vim's insert mode.
Type ZZ to exit vim (must be capital letters).
You should see the following message: crontab: installing new crontab. You can verify the crontab file by using crontab -l.

Note however that this might not work depending on the content of your ~/.vimrc file.

mwfearnley

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Cao Manh DatCao Manh Dat

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I've never had this problem, but I create a ~/.crontab file and edit that (which allows me to back it up, Time Machine or otherwise), then run

You can’t use your sketch to mark those sentences. But, the iSkysoft PDF Editor Pro for Mac has the solution. Review of iskysoft pdf editor 6 professional for mac.

Has worked for me for 20+ years across many flavors of unix.

Michael CampbellMichael Campbell

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NOTE: the answer that says to use the ZZ command doesn't work for me on my Mavericks system, but this is probably due to something in my vim configuration because if I start with a pristine .vimrc, the accepted answer works. My answer might work for you if the other solution doesn't.

On MacOS X, according to the crontab manpage, the crontab temporary file that gets created with crontab -e needs to be edited in-place. Vim doesn't edit in-place by default (but it might do some special case to support crontab -e), so if your $EDITOR environment variable is set to vi (the default) or vim, editing the crontab will always fail.

To get Vim to edit the file in-place, you need to do:

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That should enable you to update the crontab when you do crontab -e with the :wq or ZZ commands.

You can add an autocommand in your .vimrc to make this automatically work when editing crontabs:

Another way is to add the setlocal nowritebackup to ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/crontab.vim, which will be loaded by Vim automatically when you're editing a crontab file if you have the Filetype plugin enabled. You can also check for the OS if you're using your vim files across multiple platforms:

Dave MeybohmDave Meybohm

The use of cron on OS X is discouraged. launchd is used instead. Try man launchctl to get started. You have to create special XML files that define your jobs and put them in a special place with certain permissions.

You'll usually just need to figure out launchctl load

Edit

If you really do want to use cron on OS X, check out this answer: https://superuser.com/a/243944/2449

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AndyAndy

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I did 2 things to solve this problem.

I touched the crontab file, described in this linkcoderwall.com/p/ry9jwg (Thanks @Andy).
Used Emacs instead of my default vim: EDITOR = emacs crontab -e (I have no idea why vim does not work)

crontab -lnow prints the cronjobs. Now I only need to figure out why the cronjobs are still not running ;-)

mollerhojmollerhoj

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As has been mentioned cron is deprecated (but supported), and launchd is recommended for OS X.

This is taken from developer.apple.com

Effects of Sleeping and Powering Off

If the system is turned off or asleep, cron jobs do not execute; they will not run until the next designated time occurs.

If you schedule a launchd job by setting the StartCalendarInterval key and the computer is asleep when the job should have run, your job will run when the computer wakes up. However, if the machine is off when the job should have run, the job does not execute until the next designated time occurs.

All other launchd jobs are skipped when the computer is turned off or asleep; they will not run until the next designated time occurs.

Consequently, if the compute

Mac Osx Set Default Editor For Crontab