How to run a script at a certain time on Linux?

Question

I have a text file containing a specific date and time. I want to be able to run a script at the time specified in that file. How would you achieve that? Create another script that runs in background (sort of a deamon) and checks every second if the current time is matching the time in the file? Is there another way? The machine is a linux server , Debian wheezy. Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Look at the following:

echo "ls -l" | at 07:00

This code line executes "ls -l" at a specific time. This is an example of executing something (a command in my example) at a specific time. "at" is the command you were really looking for. You can read the specifications here:

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/en/man1/at.1posix.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man1/at.1posix.html