I’ve been having a lot of trouble with crons under MacOS. They often break for me. I was troubleshooting a recent issue using AI and figured out that the cron app didn’t have permission to access much of my disk, even though it was running under my own user.
To fix it, you need to grant cron permission to access the appropriate directories.
Go to System Settings > Privacy & Security (or Security & Privacy on older macOS) and add cron (usually /usr/sbin/cron) under Full Disk Access. Then run your cron job again.
Written by Joel Dare on February 8, 2025.
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