There is this one really interesting page from introduction to linux that discussed a few ways to schedule processes, of course, the most commonly used one is crontab which is like the oozie for hadoop, the go-to scheduler. Besides of that, they talked about a command called “at” and a few fun use cases of using “sleep”.
First start with sleep command, it does nothing but sleep. Using it with other commands in combo running in the background kind of built a naive working timer. Like “in 5 minutes, I need to head to the other building”. Then you can type the following command
(sleep 5m; echo "you need to go now!") &
will actually first sleep for 5 minutes and then print out a message to stdout for your reminder. I know you have your iPhone but.. this is kind of cool right? but do you think you iPhone can kick out a map reduce job maybe two hours later? this sure can 🙂
Second, there is a command called “at”, where it is actually not installed as default on Redhat, you can easily install it by using “sudo yum install at”. Before you do anything, first you need to run “sudo atd” so the daemon is working and listening. Otherwise, you run at command and it won’t work. Once you are done with that, you can simply run the command like “at HH:MM”, here is the screenshot of how it is working:
A few notes regarding the small test:
- atq: list all the existing at commands waiting in the queue, empty in this case
- after the second echo command, you need to hit Ctrl+D to exit
- after 00:29:00, there is a file got generated named output.txt!
After learning this command, I can totally imagine how many pranks I have play for the April Fool’s day next year, ahaha!
datafireball 