This has become a major area of frustration for me. Specifically, I'm trying to get the command line version of setiathome to kick off on startup (and automatically if it goes down). In the past, I've had no problems with getting the Rhapsody version of seti@home running in a cron job, but that was before MacOS X as we know it came along. To make a long story short, I have tried every variation of users' crontabs to get this line in the cron execution pipe, and nothing seems to want to kick the process off. I have even resorted to
Cronnix (excellent app) to get the job done. The line as it appears in my various crontabs:
0 * * * * cd [path to my seti dir here];[space]
./setiathome -nice 19 > /dev/console 2> /dev/console
[Editor's note: Line break inserted for readability; it's really one line, and replace '[space]' with a true space character.]
I'm on the verge of giving up, but postings on this site have given me hope (someone is making this command work).
Perhaps I'm missing something really obvious, but in any case, I need help. How do you make a cron job kick off? What am I missing -- or misunderstanding? Links to a good Cron or MacOS X (or FreeBSD) UNIX tutorial?