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Scheduled scans with cron

Hello forum,

Sophos has decided that they are going to stick with the older format for scheduling scans on Mac OS. They have stated that 'Launchd is unreliable for scheduled tasks'; their words, not mine. I believe their issue was creating the System Agent job and the implications that may arise, that however is purely speculation.

After searching around the internets and webs and spheres for a while I couldn't really find much of value for creating/editing/modifying crontabs when Sophos was involved. I also was not a super seasoned pro with cron but I digress.

Below is a simple bash script that should help people with this task:

#! /bin/bash
crontab -l | sed -e "/^#.*/d" > /tmp/cron-$$
echo "30      12      *       *       3       sweep / -di -p=/var/log/sophosScheduledScan.log" >> /tmp/cron-$$
crontab -u root /tmp/cron-$$
rm /tmp/cron-$$

Please be careful with the line breaks, ensure that from 'echo' to 'cron-$$' are all on the same line. The code box keeps flagging the forum security for HTML.

I am not sure if sweep follows policy in regards to 'Exclude Remote Files', I am testing this now. If anyone knows please share.

Lastly, since I don't believe that launchd is unreliable I am working on a .plist file now to add to system agents. More to follow on that.

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0 myke over 15 years ago

Hello, I have modified the script to do a check and simplify things.

#!/bin/bash
CRONGREP=`crontab -l | grep sophosScheduledScan.log`

if [ "$CRONGREP" != "" ]; then
        exit
else
        crontab -l > /tmp/cron-$$
        echo "30      12      *       *       4       sweep / -di -p /var/log/sophosScheduledScan.log" >> /tmp/cron-$$
        crontab -u root /tmp/cron-$$
        rm /tmp/cron-$$
fi

Thanks

0 MattPrytuluk over 14 years ago

great post myke!
the log option is -p=<name of your log> so you might want to adjust your script but otherwise, this is fantastic stuff.
thanks!
matt
:5914
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