The at command suddenly/randomly executes jobs

Question

The at command has a strange behaviour, and I can't find why.

Story - In 3 days, I'll need to send emails at specific times to make a surprise to someone. I won't be able to monitor if everything is running correctly, because I'll be in a plane for ~20 hours. Everything shall run perfectly. :-)

Script - I am using the at command to queue jobs for later execution. I created a bunch of files (one per mail), with the following format:

^{Content of mail1.txt (example)}

This is a subject
This is a message...
... on several lines

This is my script:

#!/bin/bash

function sendit {
        FROM_MAIL="[email protected]"
        RCPT_MAIL="[email protected]"

        SUBJECT=$(head -n  1 $1)
        MESSAGE=$(tail -n +2 $1)

        echo -e "$MESSAGE" |mail -s "$SUBJECT" -r $FROM_MAIL $RCPT_MAIL
}

# Note, time is EDT, it correspond to the date of my server
sendit mail1.txt|at 02:37 May 03
sendit mail2.txt|at 02:38 May 03
sendit mail3.txt|at 03:13 May 03
[...]

I then run my script:

$ bash script.sh
warning: commands will be executed using /bin/sh
job 35 at Tue May  3 02:37:00 2016
warning: commands will be executed using /bin/sh
job 36 at Tue May  3 02:38:00 2016
warning: commands will be executed using /bin/sh
job 37 at Tue May  3 03:13:00 2016
[...]

Everything seems perfect, however, when I check my mails a few minutes after, I saw that some of the mails have been sent... (it seems random)

Any idea?

Answer 1

The | sends the stdout of the left process to the right command. Your sendit function actually sends the mail, but doesn't produce much output on stdout (I actually don't remember what the output of mail is), so the input to at isn't a command to send the mail.

Consider that as a user, you would typically have used at like this:

at 02:37 May 03        # This will read commands from stdin until Ctrl/D
sendit mail1.txt
Ctrl/D

You could have also piped the sendit command to at programmatically:

echo 'sendit mail1.txt' | at 02:37 May 03

Answer 2

I think you mean echo sendit mail1.txt|at 02:37 May 03.