Anacron for MacOS

Anacron runs the periodic daily, weekly and monthly tasks on your Mac even if the machine (a laptop, for example) spends much of its time asleep or switched-off. Anacron silently checks when you reboot and every sixty minutes while the computer is running to see if the various periodic scripts are overdue, and runs them if necessary. The advantage of Anacron over many other solutions to this issue is that it runs as a proper Unix background process, requires no user intervention, and uses the regular periodic scripts.

Note: This version of Anacron will run on MacOS 10.5 (Leopard) but it is not needed, as the Leopard launchd will run skipped jobs when the machine is next awake.

Download Anacron for MacOS

Can I run this on MacOS 10.3 (Panther) or 10.2 (Jaguar)?

This version of Anacron has been updated to work with the launchd daemon in MacOS 10.4 (Tiger) and later versions of MacOS. You can find Anacron for earlier versions of MacOS at Alastair's Place.

Do I need to know a bunch of terminal commands?

Anacron comes in an installer and requires no configuration or setup. Once installed, it runs as a background daemon and needs no attention. Installing this version of Anacron will upgrade an older installation, including removing obsolete startup files and editing /etc/crontab to remove entries that are no longer used.

How do I know Anacron is working?

Anacron logs entries in /var/log/system.log when it runs the periodic tasks. You will also notice that the files daily.out, weekly.out and monthly.out in /var/log are being updated.

After I upgraded to Leopard I get error anacron messages in /var/log/system.log?

The messages are harmless. If you did not reinstall anacron after updating to Leopard, you can stop the messages by deleting /Library/Launchdaemons/anacron.plist and restarting the computer. Or follow the instructions in the installer ReadMe to disable and remove anacron.

Can I use Anacron to run jobs other than the periodic scripts?

Yes. To run a local command as part of the periodic jobs, add it to /etc/daily.local, /etc/weekly.local or /etc/monthly.local. Create the file(s) as executable shell scripts if they do not exist. To add jobs at other intervals, see man anacron and man anacrontab. For MacOS 10.5 it is probably better to use launchd scripts to launch jobs.