Why is cron being deprecated?

Question

I just found out that cron has been deprecated in Mac OS X. Why is this, and will it eventually be completely removed from future releases?

Answer 1

With the release of Mac OS 10.4, launchd was chosen to supersede cron in Mac OS. Here's a cached version of the launchd page from the Apple Developer Connection in 2005. It explains why cron was deprecated, as well as the benefits of launchd from Apple's perspective.

The summary: launchd was created to not just replace cron but also init, xinetd for better performance, and better control over configuration and the actual tasks themselves.

The launchd daemon offers a single, standardized, interface to any and all programs started automatically by the system. Furthermore, the configuration files that determine when to run a given program can also specify resource limits and environment variables, which simplifies setup and security for many programs. The same configuration file format is used whether a job is launched once at system startup or user login, on demand over the network, or at intervals.

Answer 2

The wikipedia article on launchd has a very good summary, extended discussions as well as some great videos and external links for a deeper dive into this decision by Apple.

In a nutshell, launchd replaces 7 major tasks and a boatload of scripts (inetd, init and rc and associated shell script structures, crond, atd, watchdogd, SystemStarter) with one much more powerful open sourced tool.

Why:

• faster
• more powerful
• unified and centralized
• more secure

When: 29 April 2005 (When OS X Tiger was released for sale)

There's nothing from preventing us all from using launchd to start cron now on Tiger, Leopard or Snow Leopard.

Should future Apple stop shipping /usr/sbin/cron, it will surely end up like wget and other mature open source tools that get compiled and need to be added as a separate command line tool.