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up vote 7 down vote favorite
2

I use this

sleep 900; <command>

on my shell. Just wanted to know is there is some alternate/better way that you use?

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4  
you can do sleep 15m && command, that way if you want to cancel it you can ctrl-c it (your version would run the command if you ctrl-c it). – OneOfOne Apr 25 '11 at 0:54
@OneOfOne I don't know if it's shell or something else dependent, but I've never seen Ctrl+C fallthrough like that; it cancels the entire line – Michael Mrozek♦ Apr 25 '11 at 8:28
@Michael I coulda swore it used to do that with older bash, I just tried and it didn't, so ignore my comment – OneOfOne Apr 25 '11 at 18:37
1  
@OneOfOne: It did up to bash 3.x; that's fixed in bash 4. – Gilles Apr 25 '11 at 21:58
Thanks @Gilles, I thought I was being crazy :D – OneOfOne Apr 26 '11 at 4:21

2 Answers

up vote 23 down vote accepted

You are searching for at (at@wikipedia)?

usr@srv % at now + 15 min
at> YOUR COMMAND HERE

You can define multiple commands that should be executed in 15 min, seperate them with a return.
Confirm all commands with control+d.

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up vote 3 down vote

I use a short script I keep in my path, called after, containing

at now + "$@"

This way it's very easy to, for example, type:

after 15 min

then any commands and Ctrl-D, or

echo COMMANDS | after 15 min

which does the same.

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4  
you might want to use "$@" instead of $* -- then arguments containing spaces will be properly quoted – glenn jackman Apr 25 '11 at 11:12
Thanks for the tip. I edited my answer accordingly. I think it doesn't change anything in the context of the at command, bu it's definitely better standard practice. – Dalker Apr 28 '11 at 8:15
2  
you need to use the quotes around it: specifically "$@" not $@. Only when quoted will bash perform this special expansion: gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Special-Parameters – glenn jackman Apr 28 '11 at 10:26
@glenn, re-edited accordingly. Thanks for the tip, I didn't know that! – Dalker Apr 28 '11 at 22:59

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