At (Unix)

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At (Unix)

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 1st 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. A sample command to compile a C program at 11:45 a. m. and e-mail the results (STDOUT and STDERR) to your user ID would be:

echo "cc -o foo foo.c" | at 1145

It uses a daemon, atd, which waits in the background periodically checking the list of jobs to do and executing those at their allotted time on behalf of at.

Using the batch command instead of at, it can be made to only run scheduled jobs if the system's load average is below 0.8 per default.

Windows NT/2000/XP also has an at command (similar to cron), but it is deprecated in favor of Task Scheduler.