If Any of Your Crontab Tasks No Longer Works on macOS Catalina

It turns out to be a permission issue brought by the newly introduced security features, thus it’s not a “bUG”.

To solve it, just add your cron location (in most cases /usr/sbin/cron) to the Full Disk Access lists located at System Preferences.app -> Security & Privacy -> Privacy -> Full Disk Access. “Click the lock to make changes” and “+” to navigate to your cron location.

No idea how to navigate to /usr/sbin/cron in the file locator? Do this:

1. $ open /usr/ in terminal of your choice
2. drag sbin folder to the side bar (a.k.a. Favorites)
3. back to the file locator in System Preferences.app
4. now you should know what to do next
5. don’t forget to remove the sbin folder from Favorites afterwards if you want keep it tidy

Alternatively, you could actually use command + shift + G and typed in /usr/sbin/ in the file locator (I just find it out today).

That’s it.