macfidelity

Just sorting my old reminder-mails and here the content hehe.

If you need to get work with launchd in Mac OS X check Apple’s documentation here.

Quote:

In Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, Apple introduced a new system startup program called launchd. The launchd daemon takes over many tasks from cron, xinetd, mach_init, and init, which are UNIX programs that traditionally have handled system initialization, called systems scripts, run startup items, and generally prepared the system for the user. And they still exist on Mac OS X Tiger, but launchd has superseded them in many instances. These venerable programs are widely used by system administrators, open source developers, managers of web services, even consumers who want to use cron to manage iCal scheduling, and they can still be called with launchd.

The launchd daemon also provides a big performance boost to your system. At any given time, only those daemons that are actually used are launched; combined with the fact that daemons can shut themselves down and be relaunched as needed means that you can reduce the average memory footprint of the system.

This article gives a quick overview of why launchd was needed, what it does, and then focuses on how to migrate your configuration files from cron, xinetd, mach_init, or init to a system using launchd.

Since 10.4 i am using Lingon as frontend for launchd.

Links:

• Apple launchd Getting Started Doc
• Lingon Homepage

There are several ways to combine php-scripts with cron.

Today i realized that using CURL is an option to.

So basicly you could just do the following in commandline / Teminal.app:

curl http://your.server.ip.or.name/your-php-script-file.php

If that works for you, just continue with a manual cron-entry or using cronnix to add the cron-job

Another nice frontend i just found:

• Cronnix

Lets quote the project page:

CronniX is an Aqua frontend to the powerful Unix tool “cron”. Cron is a Unix system service that allows scheduled execution of scripts, programs, applications - in short anything that can be started from the command line. This includes OSX applications and AppleScripts.

Some Cronnix screenshots:

If you need some more basic informations about cron take a look at this link, even if its not Apple / OS X specific. I hope you enjoy this tool as i do.

Best regards

fidel