I know when using a plist in the launch daemons folder there is a key called <StartInterval>. I much prefer using launchctl when I can because it is a lot quicker then writing out a whole plist, but I have not been able to figure out how to get the process to restart after it has been killed. I have already read the man page and haven't found anything there. Is there a way? Typically I use the following command:
launchctl submit -l somename -p /path/to/script -o output.txt -e errors.txt
But that will not restart the program if it is killed after any time interval.
launchctl submit should already run the program again if it terminates for some reason:
submit -l label [-p executable] [-o path] [-e path] -- command [args]
A simple way of submitting a program to run without a configura-
tion file. This mechanism also tells launchd to keep the program
alive in the event of failure.
-l label
What unique label to assign this job to launchd.
-p program
What program to really execute, regardless of what fol-
lows the -- in the submit sub-command.
-o path Where to send the stdout of the program.
-e path Where to send the stderr of the program.
To run a program again if it exits with an error, set the SuccessfulExit criteria for KeepAlive to false:
<?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>test</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>bash</string>
<string>-c</string>
<string>n=$((RANDOM%2));say $n;exit $n</string>
</array>
<key>KeepAlive</key>
<dict>
<key>SuccessfulExit</key>
<false/>
</dict>
<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>60</integer>
</dict>
</plist>
launchd throttles jobs so it takes about 10 seconds for the program to respawn.