How Do I Set a Task to Happen in the Future?

Slick · #1 (**permalink**) 08-09-2006

Is it possible to set a task to happen in the future? Say I want to log-off only after 10 hours of being logged on with out doing any activity in between?

Corona688 · #2 (**permalink**) 08-09-2006

That one is tricky because you need some way to find out how long you've been inactive, which only the shell can really know for sure.

rhfrommn · #3 (**permalink**) 08-09-2006

The at command is used to schedule something in the future 1 time, while cron is used to schedule something for repeated running at certain intervals. Check the manpages for those to see the syntax/usage.

However, as Corona688 mentioned your problem is to determine the idle time. You'd probably have to write a script that uses w or who or some such command to check the idle time for your userid then log you off if it exceeds a threshhold. Once you've got that script use cron to run it every 5 minutes or whatever you'd like. Doing your example isn't as simple as just running 1 command.

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