What "power management concerns," exactly?

August 20, 2008 10:39 AM

Is there a good reason not to enable atrun on a desktop OSX machine?

I gather that it would run down a laptop battery, which isn't relevant to me -- but would there be any other issues to worry about? Would it prevent the machine from sleeping, or wear a groove in the hard drive from overuse, or, I dunno, give it an inferiority complex or cause excessive sweating?

posted by ook to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Best answer: One reason might be atrun not actually executing jobs in the queue on OSX 10.5, even when enabled. If that's been fixed since Apple broke it in 10.5.2, I haven't heard about it.
posted by majick at 11:09 AM on August 20, 2008

Response by poster: Huh... that'd be a pretty good reason, then. Dang.
posted by ook at 11:31 AM on August 20, 2008

Best answer: There was another AskMe about this and sergent found out what the problem was. If you specify the queue manually then things will work (that is, "at -q a ...").
posted by sbutler at 11:57 AM on August 20, 2008

Awesome! I hadn't seen that; I'll go build me a fixed atrun now. Thank you!
posted by majick at 12:04 PM on August 20, 2008

Also, I can guarantee that atrun will not, all on its own, wear a groove in the HD. Since the read/write head is never, ever supposed to tough the platters, you don't have to worry about that.
posted by sbutler at 12:04 PM on August 20, 2008

Response by poster: But why am I so sweaty all of a sudden?
posted by ook at 1:37 PM on August 20, 2008