Manually start scheduled launchd job

Question

On our Mac OS X (10.6) Server we have setup several backup scripts that are controlled by launchd and launched at specific times. For this we have defined StartCalendarInterval and this all works very well.

Now it happens that I would like to start one of these jobs out of schedule, but this does not start the job (but also does not give an error/warning):

sudo launchctl start org.job-label

The manpage of launchtl states that start is intended to test on-demand jobs, no word of scheduled jobs. Is there a way to kickstart scheduled jobs?

Edit after getting the response: Yes, manually starting scheduled jobs also works via the launchctl start command.

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 19 '11 at 00:27

5

Hmm, maybe this helps to debug your issue:

Set the log level to debug:

sudo launchctl log level debug

Tail the system.log:

sudo tail -f /var/log/system.log &

Try to start your job again:

sudo launchctl start org.job-label

answered Mar 19 '11 at 00:27

desasteralex

968
4
5

Ha, thanks, that helped. I only saw that the job wasn't running but forgot that it had its own error log, and there I found that it terminated early due to a missing directory. Fixed that, now I can start it via `launchctl start org.job-label`. Thanks for the nudge! – Pascal Mar 20 '11 at 10:27
2

`Unrecognized subcommand: log` – Violet Giraffe Jul 26 '18 at 07:31

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 19 '11 at 22:25

0

sudo launchctl -w load /Library/LaunchDaemons(Agents)/org.job-label

answered Mar 19 '11 at 22:25

BobC

432
4
9

This would load the job, which it already is, but not start it. – Pascal Mar 20 '11 at 10:17

Manually start scheduled launchd job

2 Answers2