Re: Applescript schedulers
Re: Applescript schedulers
- Subject: Re: Applescript schedulers
- From: Paul Scott <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:41:10 -0800
So, is it or is it not going to be removed eventually!? and is it
or is it not going to be replaced by launchd?
> Being new to launchd, I decided to see how it compares with cron.
> Answer: not well, IMHO.
> Apple states in the crontab manpage:
>"(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.)"
> The "absorbed" functionality is limited. For one thing, there is no
> automatic mail sent with job output, and as a result no method for
> specifying an overriding recipient or to enable/disable mail. For
> another, scheduling in launchd isn't as powerful as cron. There
doesn't
> seem to be any direct support for ranges, lists, or steps. Also, the
> subtleties of how the hour/minute/mday/month/wday combine isn't
> specified for launchd as it is for cron. In short, launchd falls
short
> in many ways as compared to cron. The claim that launchd is more
> "flexible" is dubious in light of these shortcomings, as well as its
> far more complicated XML property list format. Even for the simplest
> schedule it takes more than 15 lines of XML, whereas 1 line in
crontab
> would do the same, nay, implicitly more!
There is also no implicit shell in launchd. For example, you can't
schedule
something like "echo hello world" because there's no path to "echo".
You'd
have to schedule a shell and pass it parameters. I can't even begin to
imagine
the complexity of dealing with pipes, redirection, file descriptors,
or multiple
commands. In all likelihood you'd have to write a script to handle
these things,
and then schedule that script. Of course, for something really
complicated you'd
surely want to do that even with cron, but I have lots of simple
crontab entries
that do these things directly on the command line with no outside
scripts because
there's no need to, and it's one less thing to manage. Just another
way that
launchd fails to be more "flexible".
No need to look for further differences. These are killer.
Long live cron! :-)
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