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Question. Is cron supposed to work in OSX El Capitan?

Background. I've used crontab for years on OSX, but with El Capitan it seems not to work. I added my username to /usr/lib/cron/cron.allow and even rebooted the machine, but still my cron jobs don't do anything, nor do they mail me with errors. The manpages suggest Apple doesn't want people using cron, but they don't say it is nonfunctional (yet).

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What are the permissions and owner/group settings for your cron.allow? –  l'L'l Sep 25 at 17:37
    
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 7 24 Sep 08:11 /usr/lib/cron/cron.allow –  dank Sep 25 at 21:20
    
yep that's correct. I can't imagine Apple would disable it, well, maybe I can :p –  l'L'l Sep 25 at 21:25
    
It seems to be working normally for me under the current beta (and perms on /usr/lib/cron/cron.allow are the same). There's still a launch daemon to fire it off if /etc/crontab or /usr/lib/cron//tabs/* exist. –  Gordon Davisson Sep 26 at 5:07
    
Yes, this is odd. I see that /usr/sbin/cron is running (as root), so the system has noticed that a user is hoping to get cron activity. I'll keep playing with this and report back if I find a solution. I really do prefer cron to launchd because I want to be able to share code with colleagues who are not on osx. –  dank Sep 26 at 14:06

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According to Apple, cron was deprecated a while back. They must have finally pulled the plug in the GM of El Capitan. Apple suggests using launchd instead of cron. Here's a tutorial: launchd

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