Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2008 18:17:40 -0700 From: "Peter Wemm" <peter@wemm.org> To: "Guido Falsi" <mad@madpilot.net> Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, bsd24x7@yahoo.com Subject: Re: 'at now' not working as expected Message-ID: <e7db6d980810081817g6673b593pf9bb7e940562a340@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <48E75BB7.2060206@madpilot.net> References: <884679.22561.qm@web110112.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <48E75BB7.2060206@madpilot.net>
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On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 5:04 AM, Guido Falsi <mad@madpilot.net> wrote: > Jeff Richards wrote: >> >> When I try to schedule something immediately with an 'at now' command it >> appears to queue up but can wait multiple minutes before actually executing. >> >> Is there something I have missed with FreeBSD's version of at? I've used >> 'at now' with AIX, Linux, and OpenBSD and it immediately executes for those >> systems. >> >> I am running FreeBSD 7.0 stable. > > atrun is launched from crontab with a 5 minute granularity. So I think that > at now can launch command with at most a 5 minutes delay. > > If this is a problem you can make atrun be launched every minute > reconfiguring the crontab and you will wait at mosta one minute. > > This is explained in the at(1) man page. > > I don't know about other systems at setup. Having a stand-alone at/atrun like this is pretty antiquated. System V cron has had an integrated 'at' since the late 80's. If somebody wanted to update our vixie-cron to integrate atrun functionality it would make my day. It shouldn't be particularly hard. The trick is to leave the nasty at(1) code alone as much as possible and just do something for atrun(8). My tolerance for hacking at(1) code was exceeded when I added hacks for 'at sunrise' and 'at sunset' support to a local version. It wasn't pretty, especially when handling things like '30 minutes before sunrise' etc. (I use this for home automation stuff) -- Peter Wemm - peter@wemm.org; peter@FreeBSD.org; peter@yahoo-inc.com; KI6FJV "All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5 "If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution." -- Robert Sewell
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