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Schedule Commands for Later

Jun 15, 2009  By Shawn Powers
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at now for power commands.

Scott J.'s picture
Submitted by Scott J. (not verified) on Mon, 06/29/2009 - 14:47.

Shawn,

Another great use is to wrap commands like shutdown, init 6 or other commands you don't want to accidently recall and run from history in an “at” command.

Any command wrapped in an “at” command is not placed in the history file. So if you like to scroll through history and run commands you'll never run a shutdown command on a Mission Critical Server if you wrap it like:

at now
init 6
CRTL-d

Cheers,

Scott Johnson
AT&T Systems Analyst

Killer Recipe

FredR's picture
Submitted by FredR on Sat, 06/20/2009 - 17:53.

I actually use this one all the time, to send myself reminders. Little tip: find out your email address which sends sms messages to your phone... viola, instant reminder via text message!

You don't know how many times my phone has buzzed on the way home from work to tell me to pickup milk...

-- FLR or flrichar is a superfan of Linux Journal, and goofs around in the LJ IRC Channel

Thanks

humberto's picture
Submitted by humberto on Fri, 06/19/2009 - 21:48.

It was very helpful as an alternative to cron. :D

01010010 01010100 01000110 01001101 00100001

"at now" works!

LearnSomethingNew's picture
Submitted by LearnSomethingNew (not verified) on Tue, 06/16/2009 - 08:21.

Shawn, thanks for showing me that the "at now" works. Years ago, I had to use "at now + 1 minute," otherwise I'd get a message about "Scheduled time has already passed."

It even works when you're not logged in. So, if you decide to run a special backup at 2 AM, you don't have to add it to "cron" and then have to remember to remove it.

BTW, the output of the "at" command goes to your e-mail by default, just like "cron."

neat! didn't know about that

gecya's picture
Submitted by gecya (not verified) on Mon, 06/15/2009 - 23:54.

neat! didn't know about that command, thx!

Another wonderful Tech Tip

octopusgrabbus's picture
Submitted by octopusgrabbus (not verified) on Mon, 06/15/2009 - 12:36.

Thanks, Shawn:

It's another great Tech Tip.

Occi