User friendly way to schedule jobs in Mac OS X

Question

Is there any easy way to schedule repeated jobs in Mac OS X? I know I could use cron, but I'm looking for a more user friendly way to do it, a GUI for schedules, something like this.

Answer 1

You can schedule jobs via iCal. Create an event. Edit the event, and you'll see "Run Script" and "Open File" as options as alarms.

Answer 2

Well, there's CronniX, Maintidget, Macaroni and MacJanitor.

Have you tried using one of the launchd instead of cron? Apparently, Apple doesn't use cron anymore.

• Lingon (abandoned, but supposedly works on Leopard and Snow Leopard)
• Launchd Editor
• launchctl

Answer 3

Lingon is a GUI for creating and working with launchd. It's no longer being worked on, but works well for creating and editing Launch Agents and if you are on Leopard or Snow Leopard it's the suggested method over cron.

Answer 4

This solution does use crontab but makes it user-friendly by using the Automator

Adding a calendar event tends to clog up iCal for me. I'm using a combination of Automator and crontab.

On the Automator part, I'm recording each action I need to perform as an app (Automator > File > New > Application Template) and save it to a convenient location (File > Save as). Make sure you save it as an Application and not Workflow.

Then it's just a case of adding a cronjob for it:

0 * * * *  open /path/to/the/save/automator/app

Friendly would be nice, but right now I'm just looking for something that will run an application at a specified time on specified days -- or even every day -- under Snow Leopard, which ignores my old cron file.

Answer 5

How about Crontooie, a GUI frontend for cron:

Answer 6

Have a look at Task Till Down.

Answer 7

You can supplement the use of iCal with the use of Automator (ships with Mac OS X and is under /Applications/Automator) to visually create more complex script or actions to run.