I figured it how to log my cron job activity without switching each one over to launchd jobs.
The cron man page mentions -x
options which enables "writing of debugging information to standard output." A side effect of this is that these also write basic information to standard error. Data sent to standard error is written to /var/log/system.log
.
This results in data like this being written to /var/log/system.log
:
debug flags enabled: misc
[42073] cron started
log_it: (user1 42084) CMD (/root/bin/mysql-backup)
log_it: (user1 42094) CMD (run-parts /etc/cron.hourly)
Since cron itself is launched by launchd, to enable this, I had to edit /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.vix.cron.plist
so that it now looks like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.vix.cron</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/usr/sbin/cron</string>
<string>-x</string>
<string>misc</string>
</array>
<key>KeepAlive</key>
<dict>
<key>PathState</key>
<dict>
<key>/etc/crontab</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</dict>
<key>QueueDirectories</key>
<array>
<string>/usr/lib/cron/tabs</string>
</array>
<key>EnableTransactions</key>
<true/>
<key>StandardErrorPath</key>
<string>/var/log/cron.log</string>
</dict>
</plist>
I used -x misc
here, but it didn't seem to matter which options I used. Adding the -x
started the logging of job activity. I also added the StandardErrorPath to write to /var/log/cron.log
instead of the default /var/log/system.log
.
And then unload and reload this:
$ sudo launchctl
Password:
launchd% unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.vix.cron.plist
launchd% load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.vix.cron.plist