| ---------------------------------------- | |
| the at command | |
| November 21st, 2018 | |
| ---------------------------------------- | |
| I am going to be unavailable during my anonradio show tomorrow | |
| night, and I wanted to queue up my show stream in my absence. | |
| I knew that I could set up all the files I needed on a server | |
| somewhere (in this case, tilde.team) and cron job the stream, but | |
| it bothered me that I'd be setting up a reoccurring task for | |
| something that should be a one-shot. *nix is old enough that this | |
| couldn't be a new problem, so I searched around for a proper | |
| solution. | |
| Enter 'at'. It's exactly what I needed. Run a script AT a certain | |
| time. Just once. Tada! | |
| $ man at | |
| This reveals a lot of info, but it's pretty poorly documented, at | |
| least by my new openbsd documentation standards. It took some | |
| trial and error and searching through examples before I settled on | |
| something that appears like it should work. We'll see tomorrow | |
| night, I suppose! | |
| One final note: at runs its script as you from your current | |
| directory using your current environment. Basically, whatever your | |
| shell looked like at the moment you defined the 'at' command, | |
| that's how it'll execute. This is a huge convenience for these | |
| one-shots. | |
| If everything goes off well tomorrow night, I expect I'll be using | |
| this more often, maybe even to do simple things like cue up my | |
| outro-music for my show! |