Pesky CRON Jobs!

[berniej]

A couple of months ago, I installed BuddyRetriever and then eventually uninstalled it since I didn't find it useful.

Weeks later, I installed iPodderX and back in those days, I found podcasts way ahead of its time so I trashed it.

After trashing iPodderX, I noticed that each time I run Terminal.App, I get "mail" and when I open it, the messages are made by iPodderX's Python script.

For months I had to manually open and delete the "mail" sent to me by iPodderX... until today.

I discovered that those pesky messages are scheduled by the Darwin's CRON and it took me some minutes to research on how to remove the CRON tasks I had in my system.

Here's how I did it:

I opened a Terminal.App window and typed in "cron". From there, terminal displays all the apps with scheduled run times. then I typed in "crontab -r" command to remove the scheduled run of both BuddyRetriever and iPodderX from my system! Good thing that these are the only contents of my crontab and there's no need to edit it.

Whew! This is a life saver since I'm already considering a clean re-format/re-install of my system just to get rid of those pesky CRON jobs...

I hope this helps other with the same problems...

To know more about CRON and CRONTAB, type MAN CRON or MAN CRONTAB on your terminal window

[mgd]

Hmmm... I got a "permission denied" error. I tried "sudo cron" but no output. Would just like to verify if this means that I have no cron jobs.

[polar_bear]

one easy way is to use GUIs like Cronnix (from versiontracker). these allow easier management of cron jobs

[alistair]

I get a "cron: can't lock /var/run/cron.pid, otherpid may be 170: Resource temporarily unavailable" error.

Heheh... I suspected it was a pesky cron job before, I guess now it's time to brush up on my *nix once more...

[mgd]

I'm getting that too now.

Originally posted by alistair
I get a "cron: can't lock /var/run/cron.pid, otherpid may be 170: Resource temporarily unavailable" error.

Will check out cronix. Thanks polar!

[berniej]

Yep! CronniX is a great and user-friendly alternative in looking at your crontab. However, it does not, apparently, work for Tiger. I can't say first hand since I haven't upgraded my 'Book to Tiger (yet).

On and another thing... in order to make the things in my first post work, you'll have to enable "root" under Netinfo Manager (then disable it when you are done with these tasks).