A year ago I used the at command,and I seemed to manage OK.
But now I am a year older, so I think twice as slowly .. as a result, I can't get it to work. I'm sure there's a silly gotcha in there, something obvious, I'm not doing.

How far do I get at the moment? Well (say it's 17:00 hours) I just type "at 17:05" then <return>. I get a ">" quote and type the command "echo 'here I am'" and then <return> again. Then <ctrl>+d. Then "atq" to see if it's been recorded (it has). Then I wait ...

But nothin happens. After 17:05, I check atq, and the job has disappeared, but I have no record of it having been performed.

Any suggestions?

Hi.

The 'at' daemon spawns its own shell, then executes the command there, so you won't see the output. 'here I am' will have been echoed, but into the abyss instead of your terminal.

Try redirecting the echo command to a file, and see if the file appears at the specified time.

Dave

ah, the light shines!
many thanks, ilikejam!

Is that maybe what the man pages means when it talks about at using /bin/sh ... I expect, it's implied by that.

happy christmas ilikejam, you've already given somebody a present! Appreciated!

'at' mails any stdout and stderr to the user AFAIK.

Yes, they get mailed to you (type "mail" to see). And because it's both STDOUT and STDERR, yes, it can get very verbose.

The significance of spawning its own shell, is that all the aliases which one might have in one's .bashrc are unavailable.

You need to write out the full commmand or make a bash script out of it.

Another reason, if more were needed, for calling aliases a bad habit.

I still use them all the time though.