[tor-relays] Thoughts on automatically updating tor software on macos High Sierra

teor teor2345 at gmail.com
Mon Jul 9 23:49:47 UTC 2018


Hi,

> On 10 Jul 2018, at 09:21, Keifer Bly <keifer.bly at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> So for a while I have been struggling to find a way to automatically update the tor relay software on macOS High Sierra. What I am currently doing is running a batch file that runs the command “brew upgrade tor” continuously. However, I am attempting to find a way to do this automatically on macos High Sierra where the process doesn’t have to be running  every second.

We do stable Tor releases at most every few weeks, so once a day should be fine.

> Here’s the unfortunate thing, on the newest macos operating systems, it appears there is no possible way to run terminal commands automatically, as crontab has been disabled / removed from newer mac operating systems (I discussed this with Apple technical support) and applications to run scripts automatically are incompatible with newer macos.

On macOS High Sierra, cron is deprecated, but not disabled:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deprecation

So I’m not surprised that Apple technical support told you not to use it.

> Any thoughts on this would be appreciated, thank you.

You might find this stack overflow answer helpful:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32781884/is-crontab-broken-on-osx-el-capitan

Here’s how I executed a command via cron on macOS High Sierra:
($ means: In a non-root user terminal, run the command after the $)

$ crontab -e
Type:
* * * * *  /usr/bin/osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to display dialog "I am cron"'
Exit your editor.
Wait a minute, then check the Finder for a dialog.

Next time you have a general sysadmin question, try searching online for the answer.

T
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