crontab
is legacy unix and is not the preferred facility for running scheduled tasks. This means you are not seeing all the background daemons that actually being run in your system. So you have a lot more checking to do. Below I give a brief description OS X's preferred facility for running scheduled tasks.
In OS X scheduled tasks are managed by launchd
. There are two types of launchd
tasks: LaunchDaemons and LaunchAgents. Both LaunchDaemons and LaunchAgents are configured in .plist files. You use the launchctl
command to install, uninstall, start, stop, etc daemons and agents. Read the man pages for for both launchd
and launchctl
for info on how to use these tools.
LaunchDaemons start running at system boot. They are system-global in that they are user-independent. They are stored in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/
, and /Library/LaunchDaemons/
.
LaunchAgents start running at user login. They come in two flavors: system-global and per-user. They are stored in /System/Library/LaunchAgents/
, /Library/LaunchAgents/
and ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
.
EDIT
In the .plist file defining a daemon or agent there's more than one way to specify the time at which the daemon/agent should run. Your question suggests the culprit starts at ~6:00 AM. You will likely want to check the StartCalendarInterval
property in each .plist file. Read the man page for launchd.plist
to learn more about scheduling daemons/agents.