Cron is nice and all, but don’t forget about its cousin at.
…even though I’ve been using Linux for 20 years, I still learn about new (to me) command-line tools all the time. In this “Back to Basics” article series, I plan to cover some of the command-line tools that those new to Linux may never have used before. For those of you who are more advanced, I’ll spread out this series, so you can expect future articles to be more technical. In this article, I describe how to use the at utility to schedule jobs to run at a later date.
at vs. Cron
at is one of those commands that isn’t discussed very much. When people talk about scheduling commands, typically cron gets the most coverage. Cron allows you to schedule commands to be run on a periodic basis. With cron, you can run a command as frequently as every minute or as seldom as once a day, week, month or even year. You also can define more sophisticated rules, so commands run, for example, every five minutes, every weekday, every other hour and many other combinations. System administrators sometimes will use cron to schedule a local script to collect metrics every minute or to schedule backups.
Read more at Linux Journal
