MacOS – Terminal not logged in properly

For anyone who ends up on this page, I realized I should post the answer:

Using launchd instead of cron does indeed fix the authorization problem. Your user launchd jobs (which run only when you are logged in) correctly use the SSH agent information that was unlocked via your keychain as part of login (as part of standard OS X key management, no other software required).

To minimize my interactions with launchd, I created a single launchd job that calls a bash script. In this way I can simply edit the script without dealing with launchd.

Here's the launchd file:

<?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.mycron.hourly</string>

  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>/Users/john/bin/cron.hourly</string>
  </array>

  <key>Nice</key>
  <integer>1</integer>

  <key>StartInterval</key>
  <integer>3600</integer> <!-- start every X seconds -->

  <key>RunAtLoad</key>
  <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

I saved the file to ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.mycron.hourly.plist, and then loaded it with:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.mycron.hourly.plist

Once loaded, it will run right away and then again every 60 minutes.

If you follow the same procedure, you'll want to change the `ProgramArguments' string with the right path to your script.

Modify the file .bash_profile with nano or another appropriate editor:

Replace:

export PATH=’/usr/local/bin:?? 
# Setting PATH for Python 2.7
# The orginal version is saved in .bash_profile.pysave
PATH="/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin:${PATH}"
export PATH 

by:

# Setting PATH for Python 2.7
# The orginal version is saved in .bash_profile.pysave
export PATH=/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin:$PATH

Explanation:

The first line of your current .bash_profile

export PATH=’/usr/local/bin:?? 

modifies the standard value of $PATH given by /etc/paths from

/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin 

to ’/usr/local/bin:?? - which is no valid path.

The fourth and fifth line of your current .bash_profile modifies $PATH to

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin:’/usr/local/bin:??

Since ’/usr/local/bin:? is no valid path the finally effective PATH is

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin

which completely breaks your standard PATH. You can still execute all executables in the above directories but you can't omit the superior directories (e.g. to execute nano you have to enter /usr/bin/nano instead of nano).