There's two companion programs: cron for repeating events, at for one-time
jobs. There's some flexibility built into both; I use them all the time
for completely lame (but important to me) things.
Like:
at now + 30 minutes
mail -s "Take the enchilada out of the oven!" deirdre </dev/null
[control-D]
This will send me an email 30 minutes from whenever I type the command
that will remind me to keep my dinner from burning. And yes, I also use
this for reminding me to get my clothes out of the dryer. :)
It doesn't have to be today either:
at 1730 monday
mail -s "Go Home!" deirdre </dev/null
[Control-D]
You can also specify certain times of day as words: noon, midnight and
teatime (1600). Time is specified in 2400 format without punctuation.
The </dev/null says "don't put anything in the body of the message." You
can include a file.
Because I'm lazy about turning off my alarm clock and rolling back into
bed, I have a cron job that tries to prevent that -- but only on Monday
through Friday of course :). The trick is keeping the computer speakers
turned up loud enough that it'll actually get me up out of bed. But here's
the command as it appears in a crontab entry:
30 6 * * 1-5 /usr/local/bin/mpg123 /home/deirdre/annoydeirdre
The latter is a list of annoying songs, typically starting with something
loud like 2Unlimited's "Are You Ready For This?" :)
Of course, I have to be coherent enough to get up, remember how to get the
pid and kill it, so typically that means I'm pretty darn awake. :)
_Deirdre * http://disclaimer.deirdre.org * http://www.deirdre.net
"I would rather choose to have my leg bitten off than to buy NT"
Rob Narberes, Information Systems Manager, DNA Plant Technologies Corp
as quoted in (!) Computerworld
