In Unix-like computer operating systems, the at command is used to schedule commands to be executed once, at a particular time in the future. More precisely, it reads a series of commands from standard input and collects them into one "at-job" which is carried out at a later date. The at-job inherits the current environment, so that it is executed in the same working directory and with the same environment variables set as when it was scheduled. It differs from cron which is used for recurring executions (e.g. once an hour, every Tuesday, January 1 every year). As with cron, many Unix systems allow the administrator to restrict access to the at command. at can be made to mail a user when done carrying out a scheduled job of theirs, can use more than one job queue, and can read a list of jobs to carry out from a file instead of standard input.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Sep 2013 11:32:02 +0000