at
command is used to schedule commands to be executed once at a particular time in the future. More precisely, it reads a series of commands from standard input and collects them into one "at-job" which is carried out at a later date. It is found in the Unix family of operating systems and other flavors as well.
at
can be made to mail a user when done carrying out a scheduled job of theirs, can use more than one job queue, and can read a list of jobs to carry out from a file instead of standard input.
It uses a daemon, atd
, which waits in the background periodically checking the list of jobs to do and executing those at their allotted time on behalf of at
. It can be made to only run scheduled jobs if the system's load average is below a certain value.