[X4U] OK with cron tasks if apps left running?

[Jim Scott]

On Jan 8, 2009, at 3:13 PM, Al Grappone wrote:

>
> On Jan 8, 2009, at 14:41, Jim Scott wrote:
>
>> It's a wonderful, free utility that does what 10.4 and 10.5 are  
>> supposed to do automatically, but don't do at all if your Mac is  
>> turned off at night.
>
> I do not turn off my iMac 20" at night. I put it to sleep. Running  
> 10.5.6. Do I still need Anacron?

Al,

Good question. Some people say a sleeping 10.5 (and 10.4) system wakes  
up and runs the cron jobs; others say it doesn't/won't. Check for  
yourself to see if your system wakes up late at night (2-3 a.m.) and  
runs daily, weekly and monthly cron jobs by going here (Console is  
found in your Applications>Utilities folder):

Console>Log Files>/var/log

Then look for daily.out, monthly.out and weekly.out. Read the data (if  
any) in the logs, and that should answer your question. If you find no  
data, then I suggest installing Anacron, which only works in 10.4 and  
10.5. That's what I did, because I usually turn off my iMac 10.5.6  
overnight. Also, I found that even when I left it on for Azureus/Vuze  
downloads, Leopard wasn't running the cron jobs. I put Console in my  
Dock, and check it occasionally to make sure Anacron's doing its job.  
It always has, which is the kind of utility I like. :^)

HTH,

Jim Scott