If you have a look at the running processes on the iPhone (e.g. using 'ps ax'), you can find cron running in the background.

"Nice," I thought and added a crontab entry to fire Erica Sadun's tweet script on a regular schedule. This has many advantages over creating a launch deamon. First, I can adjust the time and schedule to much more detail and, second, I don't have to reboot the iPhone on any change in this schedule.

This works well as long as the iPhone in switched on, but unfortunately, cron seems not to be active during stand-by.

Is this the case or do I miss something basic?

Cya,

freefall.

Pushing this up after a week shouldn't be too impolite.

Haven't anybody tried to use cron, yet?

Cya,

freefall.

its active even while on sleep mode. at least mine does. how did you configure your cron jobs?

I called "crontab -e" and added

*/5 * * * * /var/root/bin/tweet

It worked fine while the iPhone was turned on but stopped working as soon as I put it to sleep.

Cya,

freefall.

user crontabs doesn't work for me too. use system crontab. create 1 crontab file in /etc. it should work, even while sleeping.

Cron on the iPhone will not bring the phone out of sleep. Launchd also has the same problem.

You will find that this is a problem goes beyond the iPhone implementation of OSX. To get the iPhone to wake up for an event you need to schedule a power event and to my knowledge that is only possible by making an OS call.

It should be possible to hack a little program together that will run something at a future time. No promises as I'm traveling but I'll look at it.

Originally Posted by freefall

If you have a look at the running processes on the iPhone (e.g. using 'ps ax'), you can find cron running in the background.

"Nice," I thought and added a crontab entry to fire Erica Sadun's tweet script on a regular schedule. This has many advantages over creating a launch deamon. First, I can adjust the time and schedule to much more detail and, second, I don't have to reboot the iPhone on any change in this schedule.

This works well as long as the iPhone in switched on, but unfortunately, cron seems not to be active during stand-by.

Is this the case or do I miss something basic?

Cya,

freefall.

Update:

Ok give this a try. It will execute an arbitrary command line at a specified date and time, even if the phone is asleep. It is possible to change the code to even wake the phone from power off.

Download from here,

h**p://www.rapid$hare.com/files/96834608/Schedule.zip.html

Command line arguments,

Code:

# ./Schedule -h
Usage: Schedule [OPTION]
-H	xx	Hour
-m	xx	Minuites
-M	xx	Month
-D	xx	Day
-Y	xx	Year
-C	xx	Command to execute with arguments
-p		Delete any AutoWake events and exit

An example using Erica's playaudio,

Code:

./Schedule -H 16 -m 5 -M 3 -D 3 -Y 2008 -C "/var/root/bin/playaudio /Library/Ringtones/Duck.m4r"

what is */5 in a crontab ?

Originally Posted by adyh

what is */5 in a crontab ?

At the first position, this means "every 5 minutes" instead of "every minute", what a single * would be.

Cya,

freefall.

Originally Posted by freedom

Update:

Ok give this a try. It will execute an arbitrary command line at a specified date and time, even if the phone is asleep. It is possible to change the code to even wake the phone from power off.

Great start. But I've got a few questions:

• Where does it come from?
• Any documentation around (other than -h)?
• How does it affect battery usage?
• Are there any interval options?
• Does it really have to run in background?

Cya,

freefall.