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Speak the time on the hour via Terminal
Authored by: barefootguru on Jan 02, '08 12:27:01PM
If you read the man page for crontab you'll see:
(Darwin note: Although cron(8) and crontab(5) are officially supported under Darwin, their functionality has been absorbed into launchd(8), which provides a more flexible way of automatically executing commands. See launchctl(1) for more information.)
There's lots of examples available around the web for creating your own plist files in ~/Library/LaunchAgents, e.g.: http://developer.apple.com/macosx/launchd.html

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Speak the time on the hour via Terminal
Authored by: mmnw on Jan 02, '08 01:18:11PM

Except isn't very precise about Time. It has a known bug (or feature??) which makes the StartCalendarInterval (and in some cases the StartInterval) key virtually unusable. First StartInterval starts at "random" times, not at full or half hours like cron would do it (it just starts the job "roughly" every 60 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever you want). Then StartCalendarInterval gets totally out of it's time if you send your mac to sleep, it will just add the sleeping time to the time specified, which makes this key totally useless.
This is known to apple and discussed on the apple-forums in several topics (just search for StartCalendarInterval) and makes a launchd job totally unusable for this hint. That's why you would use cron for this, and why cron is still delivered with leopard.



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