FAQ: How do I automate Anthracite as a cron job?

Anthracite can be run from the UNIX command line and therefore can be scheduled just like any other UNIX command. This FAQ answer presumes you've got basic familiarity with using UNIX commands from the Terminal program.

The first step is to make sure you know the path to your Anthracite program binary, which is within the bundle that you normally associate with the double-clickable icon, for example, if you put Anthracite into your Applications folder (as recommended), the way to launch Anthracite from the command line is:

% /Applications/Anthracite.app/Contents/MacOS/Anthracite

Which will launch the program as if you'd double-clicked it in the Finder.

Next, there are two special "flags" that you must pass to Anthracite on the command line to tell it to run (-r) and let it know which of your documents you want to have processed (-f FILEPATH).

So, if you had an Anthracite Document called "MyProcess" (with a hidden extension ".anth"), then the command-line invocation would be:

% /Applications/Anthracite.app/Contents/MacOS/Anthracite -r -f ~/Desktop/MyProcess.anth

which is what you'd enter in your "crontab" (or your "daily/weekly/monthly" script) for the command to execute.

To automate Anthracite, we want to hook this command up to Cron. Cron is a built-in UNIX system utility that allows you to schedule tasks to be performed at repeating specific times. Another command called "at" allows you to schedule a program to run at once at a specified point in the future.

On MacOS X, there are several programs that let you access the power of cron from a graphical interface (such as [url=http://www.koch-schmidt.de/cronnix/]CronniX[/url]), but traditionally, "cron jobs" as they are known are scheduled by editing a file known as your "crontab" by typing "crontab -e" and then entering specially formatted lines corresponding to what you want done and when. Again, a full cron lesson is beyond the scope of this FAQ answer, but as an example, if you wanted to run the above process every five minutes, the crontab entry would be:

*/5 * * * * /Applications/Anthracite.app/Contents/MacOS/Anthracite -r -f ~/Desktop/MyProcess.anth

Complete details on how to use cron are available from your Terminal program by typing "man cron", or from within Anthracite using the "Find Unix Commands" menu and typing in "cron" for the command to find.