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On Linux, many distros ship with systemd. Systemd supports "timers", which are a kind of systemd service for running programs on a schedule. There are of course many ways of scheduling tasks, such as the venerable cron which was replaced by systemd. However, the benefits of systemd specifically are:

  • CLI with convenient commands to enable, disable and check the status of timers
  • Each scheduled task is entirely defined in a single text file
  • The timer syntax is very extensive with ways to cover different types of exceptional situations and corner cases

Is there a similar way of scheduling tasks in OS X? I am interested primarily in running command line programs and scripts, so GUI support is not important to me.

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  • launchd is the mac equivalent.
    – benwiggy
    Commented Feb 24, 2023 at 22:14
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    As a side note: OS X is already dated name of the Apple desktop operating system. Since 2016, specifically since the version 10.12 (macOS Sierra) it is officially called macOS.
    – informatik01
    Commented Feb 26, 2023 at 14:11

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On Linux, many distros ship with systemd. Systemd supports "timers", which are a kind of systemd service for running programs on a schedule... Is there a similar way of scheduling tasks in OS X?

It’s called launchd.

From Wikipedia:

launchd is an init and operating system service management daemon created by Apple Inc. as part of macOS to replace its BSD-style init and SystemStarter. There have been efforts to port launchd to FreeBSD and derived systems

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