CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxbashshellcron
Cerin
Cerin

Reputation: 64739

Creating a Temporary Cron Job From the Terminal

Is there a way to create a temporary one-time only cron job from the command line? I'd like to have an egg-timer like function to open a terminal and do:

notify "time is up" 30

which would simply run this after 30 minutes:

zenity --info --text="time is up"

It seems easy enough for me to create, but I'm having a hard time believing no one has created something similar. Searching Ubuntu's repository for timing packages doesn't show anything. Has this been done before?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 5339

Answers (4)

Dennis Williamson
Dennis Williamson

Reputation: 360105

If you know that your $DISPLAY will be the same, you can do:

echo "DISPLAY=$DISPLAY zenity --info --text=\"time is up\"" | at now + 30 minutes

Providing the environment variable in this way will make it available to zenity when it's run.

Upvotes: 5

Barry Brown
Barry Brown

Reputation: 20604

You could write yourself a little script.

#! /bin/bash
sleep $(($2 * 60))
zenity --info --text="$1"

Make it executable and run it from the command line:

./notify "Time is up" 30

Upvotes: 2

Barry Brown
Barry Brown

Reputation: 20604

Use the at command.

$ at now + 30 minutes
at> zenity --info --text="time is up"
at> ^D     (press CTRL-D)

The time format is pretty flexible. Here are a bunch of examples.

$ at 11:45

$ at 0800 Friday

$ at 4pm + 3 days

$ at 9am tomorrow

Upvotes: 9

user229044
user229044

Reputation: 239311

at. http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?at

Upvotes: 0

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