'at' and queuing

[James Teh]

Hi all,

I am new to this list but have been using lftp for several years. I'd
like to extend my personal thanks and gratitude to its developer(s) for
such a great file transfer client. I have never found anything better,
and lftp continues to amaze me, particularly the addition of sftp
support (relatively recently for me) which was a feature I always
wanted.

One request/suggestion that occurred to me a while ago concerns the way
lftp deals with the 'at' command and queues. I did briefly search the list
archives, but was unable to find an equivalent suggestion; forgive me if
I missed it. (Btw, I didn't know about the 'at' command for a long time.
Someone else has already requested that some help text be added for it
(yanked from the man page perhaps?), but even inclusion in the list of
commands obtained when help is called with no arguments would be great -
it isn't listed there at all.)

Currently, the 'at' command cannot be used with queues. Often, i have
wanted to start the execution of a queue at a certain time with a
sequence of commands such as the following:
queue stop
[a series of queue commands for the current site]
at 2:15AM -- queue start
Currently, this will not work. In this example, at 2:15AM, the 'at'
command tries to start another queue which doesn't exist and therefore
achieves nothing, rather than starting the queue defined earlier.
Testing has shown me that lftp does bind 'at' commands to specific sites
and directories, so this might make it possible to determine the queue
to be started based on the context in which the 'at' command was
executed. As an additional feature, if a 'queue kill' or 'queue suspend'
command could be implemented, all queued jobs could be terminated at a
given time using 'at' (queue stop does not stop the currently executing
job). This would be neat for scheduling both the start and end times for
queued transfers, which is nice for those of us who have off-peak
bandwidth to burn. :-)

Some additional feature requests:
* Tab completion with 'at': Currently, tab completion works with queue
for file names, etc., but not with 'at'. Adding this would be extremely
useful.
* Additional commands to manipulate slots: As far as I can find, there
is no command for listing slots nor removing a slot once it has been created. 
(Actually, I just double checked and the man page does note that slot
should list currently allocated slots, but I can't get this to work.
Typing slot with no arguments does nothing.)

Thanks once again for such a great client and keep up the good work.
When I get a bit more time, I might see about trying to implement some
of these features myself. :-)

Jamie

-- 
James Teh
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