Myujth

I am surprised by the lack of information/videos on the internet about launchd. Anyways, I am fairly new to writing shell scripts and python in the Mac terminal, but am trying to automate a script to write the datetime every 20 seconds to a file.

Below is my plist file written under ~/Library/LaunchAgents.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" 
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
 <key>Label</key>
 <string>com.example.py.plist</string>
 <key>RunAtLoad</key>
 <true/>
 <key>ProgramArguments</key>
 <array>
 <string>/Users/sammahle/bin/python_file</string>
 </array>
 <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
 <integer>20</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

The 'python_file' referenced in the script is

#!/usr/bin/python
import datetime
print 'Hello World'
datetime1 = str(datetime.datetime.now())
with open('file.txt','w') as f:
 f.write(datetime1)

and when I do launchctl list I find " - 1 com.example.py.plist"
I ran the same thing for the shell script below and again received the status code "1", which according to LaunchD Plist not working means “Exit code 1 means the script exited with an error condition. If it exited with a 0 it would mean there were no errors.”

#!/bin/bash
echo "Hello World!" >> file.txt

My end goal is to run complex python scripts daily without having the program needing to be running all the time. If anyone knows a better solution (I choose launchd over cron because it is "preferred") please let me know.