Cancel a cronjob or an automatically loaded process on OS X

Question

I'm currently being bugged by Mail.app popping open every friday at the same time and simultaniously I receive mails from an app iBackup which I used to have installed.

I would like to get rid of it for good but I can't find the process or cronjob that launches Mail.app.

Things I tried:

• Terminal
  • crontab -l
  • sudo crontab -l
  • for user in $(dscl . list /users); do sudo crontab -u $user -l; done
• Searched all available locations listed by man launchd for a reference to Mail (grepped)

Where are crontabs listed in OS X? Are there any other places I can search for a script that launches every friday at the same time?

Answer 1

Although Mac OS X still has cron, since Tiger (10.4) the preferred program for automatically starting processes is launchd. It replaces cron, init, watchdogd and others. A well-written and reasonably recent Mac program would be expected to use launchd rather than cron for scheduling a periodic job.

This article is a good overview, but to address your problem more directly, have a look in ~/Library/LaunchAgents, /Library/LaunchAgents and /Library/LaunchDaemons for launchd property lists. These property lists are generally named in a reverse-domain fashion, so com.ibackup.ibackup.plist would be a good thing to start looking for. Once you find the offending file(s) do [sudo] launchctl unload /path/to/file to deactivate it. Move or delete it to prevent it being automatically reloaded on reboot.