Fingers

[shacker]

I am now very close to being able to post to MovableType and have an excerpt of my entry show up automatically on LJ. The cron business is all worked out* -- all that remains is to get the blagg author to work out a minor bug in his script. Stay tuned

Comments

[tgape]

Traditional cron, as supplied by most non-Linux unicies, have no mechanism for determining what a user's path is. This is due to a combination of not being in the user's parent process chain, and being written by coders more concerned with getting basic functionality working by 1976 at the latest. There are at least three freeware cron drop-in replacements which fix this issue. The only reason I can come up with for Apple not using one of them is undue BSD influence. (Given that MacOS 9 is about as far removed from BSD as can be imagined, I don't really understand this.)

Normally, cron supplies all of its children with a default PATH, as set by a file dependent on your OS (it's in /etc/default/login on Solaris; I've not found it on MacOSX yet.) It usually defaults to something like /usr/bin:/bin (and seems to on my MacOSX box).

That should find your rm and sh for you.

Incidentally, I was just reading your bit on 'Tales of a BeOS Refugee'. I wish more people from Apple would've read it, specifically 12 through 16, as most of your complaints there have yet to be fixed. Sigh. I think the thing I find the most frustrating is the number of configurables they've included, which they made no GUI to configure, and so we have to wait until some third party finds them and writes a configuration app that should've been standard.