Levi, launchd does not depend on or otherwise require the machine to have a shell. In fact, Apple's iPhone does not even have /bin/sh. If you want to express environmental variables as command line arguments, please consider having launchd run: /sbin/sh -c $HOME/something/something- else.sh davez On Mar 4, 2008, at 2:24 PM, Levi Brown wrote:

Hi All,

While trying to understand why my console had log entries every two minutes such as this:

3/4/08 10:40:00 com.apple.launchd[1] (0x102450.cron[9834]) Could not setup Mach task special port 9: (os/kern) no access

I decided that perhaps it was time to get rid of my cron jobs in favor of launchd.plist entries. So I set out to convert my crontab entry:

*/2 * * * * /bin/sh "${HOME}/Library/Automation/checkmail.sh" > /dev/ null 2>&1

into a launchd.plist of equal functionality. I presently have:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd "> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>Label</key> <string>com.lab.checkmail</string> <key>ProgramArguments</key> <array> <string>/bin/sh</string> <string>/Users/labrown/Library/Automation/checkmail.sh</string> </array> <key>StartInterval</key> <integer>120</integer> </dict> </plist>

But I'm unsettled by needing to specify a hard-coded path to my script. Notice, in my crontab entry I was able to access HOME, but when I try that in the plist, it is taken literally (without expanding) and causes obvious problems.

HOME is set appropriately, and I can verify that by issuing the 'export' command to launchctl.

How does one work around this issue?

Thanks,

Levi_______________________________________________ launchd-dev mailing list launchd-dev@lists.macosforge.org http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/launchd-dev