macOS Log for cron?

[jasnw]

I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this, but maybe I'm wrong. Back in the bad-old-days, there was a system log for the cron process in which you could keep track of what cron is doing. Is this log completely gone now? Running on 13.2 (sadly).

 

[Nygaard]

At least on macOS 12.3, it appears cron doesn't have logging enabled globally, but it should respect the per-user LOGNAME and MAILTO environment variables. If your goal is to setup and monitor your own cron jobs, you're all set.

If you're looking for the log to monitor cron jobs the OS installed, they moved all their jobs over to launchd, for better or worse. There's probably a way to wrestle a log from launchd, but it's far from intuitive.

 

[jasnw]

I cobbled up my own "log" by putting an hourly time-tag script in both cron and launchd. Found that the problem I was chasing was due to Ventura (and perhaps prior macOS versions) putting the computer (not a laptop) to sleep when the display goes to sleep unless you know that there's a setting under Displays to avoid this.

 

[Nygaard]

At least in 12.3, under Energy Saver in System Preferences there is an option to "Prevent your Mac from automatically sleeping when the display is off". Whether it works or not, I don't know. pmset may give you greater control/insight towards sleep issues. There's also caffeinate to temporarily keep the computer awake under a variety of conditions.

 

[jasnw]

Not in 13.2. You are in for a shock when you "upgrade" to Ventura. Apple turned loose its Change-for-the-Sake-of-Change Department on this latest version of macOS. I love my new M2Pro Mini, but I really do not like Ventura. After a week of fighting I'm still not completely moved from my old/trusty iMac. Granted I'm jumping from El Cap to Ventura, but I've had secondary systems running up through Catalina so I wasn't expecting the levels of hassle I've encountered. This cron thing (which was also clobbered by cron needing to be entered, by hand, into the Full Disk Access list) is just one of many annoyances encountered.

 

[Nygaard]

But it has more emojis, just what you've always wanted.

 

[jasnw]

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