Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2010 23:04:47 +0000 From: Quinn <eskimo1@apple.com> To: launchd-dev@lists.macosforge.org Subject: Re: [launchd-dev] A question about launchd and cron Message-ID: <p06240832c7b73e8627e1@[10.0.40.15]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"

At 14:34 -0800 5/3/10, wierzbowski wrote:

...

Please let me know if this would be an appropriate subject for this list.

Sure. Fire away!

S+E

For demonstration purposes I've set up a simple crontab and cronjob running as myself (i.e. non-root). Here is the crontab: SHELL="/bin/sh" PATH="/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin" HOME="/Users/wierzbowski" MAILTO="wierzbowski@somewhere" * * * * * /Users/wierzbowski/bin/helloworld Here is the content of /Users/wierzbowski/bin/helloworld: #!/bin/sh /bin/echo "hello world." exit 0 Here is the output when I run the script manually: hello world. Here is the output that is mailed to me when the script runs via cron: hello world. Here is the error recorded in the syslog: Mar 5 12:17:00 macbookpro com.apple.launchd[1] (0x10e4d0.cron[97753]): Could not setup Mach task special port 9: (os/kern) no access Basically, on all the systems I manage I get that "special port 9" error in the syslog every time cron executes a job. And it doesn't seem to matter if it's a root or non-root job, if I have the environment explicit defined or not, if the cronjob is a one-liner right in the crontab or if it calls another shell script, if the script generates output or not, if the script redirects any i/o or not, if the script writes any files or not, etc. I'm just trying to figure out if there's a fundamental flaw in my cron usage on OS X, or if I've hit a bug and I just have to accept a few thousand extra lines in the syslog every day. I also realize that cron has been deprecated in favor or straight up launchd, and I'll get around to converting one of these day I swear, but for the moment I don't have the luxury of bumping that project to the top of my stack. :) I did take a quick look at the launchd source code, and I see where the error message is coming from, but I'm definitely no programmerologist and I have no idea what triggers that particular bit of code. Thanks in advance for any insight. Wierzbowski