[Fink-users] Using anacron to open items in Aqua (not a complaint that something is broken)

[Linc Davis]

The Login Items prefpane can open a list of files when a user logs in 
to the Aqua console, but as far as I know there is no Aqua equivalent 
of anacron: a task scheduler that opens a list of items once a day, 
week, or month, if the user runs an Aqua session any time during that 
period. For example, suppose you want to back up a PGP disk exactly 
once a day, every day you use the machine. The disk image is only 
mounted when you're logged in at the console as the Aqua user. You 
could set up an anacron job to do this, but if another user sometimes 
boots the machine, the backup may not run every day. If you include the 
job in your Login Items, it may run more than once a day.

To overcome this problem I wrote a script I call aquacron. It's called 
once an hour from the root crontab. The script checks to see who, if 
anyone, is running Aqua. If that user has a directory 
~/Library/Periodic, aquacron looks for an anacrontab at ~/.aquacrontab; 
if this file does not exist, a default copy is created. Then, and only 
then, aquacron calls anacron to run this anacrontab. By default, 
.aquacrontab contains three jobs, with job-identifiers unique to the 
user, to open (with user, not root, privileges) all the items at the 
root level of ~/Library/Periodic/<basedir>, for <basedir> in Daily, 
Weekly, Monthly, with the respective periodicities. The timestamps 
corresponding to these job-identifiers are updated only when the user 
is logged in, so they will accurately reflect when the Periodic items 
are due to be opened. All a user has to do to start this process is 
create a Periodic directory in his home Library.

I've found this script useful for automating tasks that use encryption. 
I have an rsync remote backup script that uses ssh as the transport 
method. When I log in locally, my private SSH key is decrypted and 
loaded into an ssh-agent by the sshLogin prefpane, which also saves the 
environment variables SSH_ASKPASS and SSH_AGENT_PID in 
~/.MacOSX/environment.plist . They're then accessible to any 
LaunchServices process, but not to a shell script that I don't launch 
directly. I was having a hard time figuring out how to get my backup 
script to read these values, but then I remembered why I was using a 
Mac, not a Linux box. So I added '.command' to the name of the script 
and dropped it in ~/Library/Periodic/Daily. Now it does just what I 
want, and I only have to type my SSH passphrase once per session.

If anyone requests it I'll post the aquacron script.

PGP public key data

user id                 Linc Davis
key id                          0xFA0D30AD
key type                        DH/DSS
key size                        2048
key fingerprint D625 5F4F 4884 144D BCA5  4522 4F65 04BF FA0D 30AD


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