I am working on a web-application and one issue that has come up is scheduling run once tasks. I know this can be done with a cron job but is there a better way to run this task? I have a shell script that I have written that basically accepts any data I pass into it to run these tasks. But I am not quite sure what the best way to schedule the task would be.

Here is a simple example of where I would use this.

1. A user has a transaction document sitting in the gloabl misc inbox.
2. User assigns the transaction document to a transaction
3. Transaction document is moved to transaction file system.
4. Scheduled task occurs and starts the transaction process.

Number 4 is where I would schedule the task to run 15 mins after the user accepts the process.

would the standard atd daemon not suffice?

Use 'at', as in:

at now + 15 minutes < somejob

That part I understand, but how do I create somejob. Is it a predefined cronjob, or is it something else?

This is the shell script I need to hit.

/usr/local/bin/cfcCron.sh <instance> <method> etc.....

This job would be created from a web-based front end.

The 'somejob' is just a collection of one or more commands. You could specify the shell script and its parameters as 'somejob'.

Just play with it at the command line.

Not quite sure if I am formating my command correctly

This is the command I have built inside coldfusion.

/usr/bin/at now + 15 minutes < /usr/local/bin/cfcCron.sh http://muURL.com/ core.papersub.com.PaperlessManager Doc_Parse&docDir=/mnt/instanceName-phx/paperless/active/FC8DA1A2-0EAF-5959-39ECA6999A8CC200/tmp/&transUUID=FC8DA1A2-0EAF-5959-39ECA6999A8CC200


Everything after /usr/local/bin/cfcCron.sh is a parameter I pass to my cfcCron.sh script.

Now when I run this from a terminal window I get this error.

[1] 8406
[2] 8407
[root@www ~]# syntax error. Last token seen: h
Garbled time

[1]- Exit 1 /usr/bin/at now + 15 minutes http://muURL.com/ core.papersub.com.PaperlessManager Doc_Parse </usr/local/bin/cfcCron.sh
[2]+ Done docDir=/mnt/instanceName-phx/paperless/active/FC8DA1A2-0EAF-5959-39ECA6999A8CC200/tmp/
[root@www ~]#

In Unix-like systems, spaces are parameter delimiters, and '&' runs a process in the background. Other special characters are similarly interpreted (see 'man bash'). To use these strings, you need to either escape them with the backslash ('\') or enclose the string in single quotes.

For your command, try: