04-02-2009
It isn't really a "night shift". It is that when stuff breaks you have to fix it whether it is at night or during the day. I've had jobs where I worked almost all normal daytime hours, others where you had night or weekend work several times per month, and others where it depended on the project you worked on. If you had to do a big project on production servers you may work every weekend and a few weeknights per week for a few months, then back to more normal hours for a while. It all depends on how the company has set up their environment (how much redundancy and high-availability they use) and also their change control rules and customer service agreements.
One other thing I didn't mention last post. I've never in over 10 years of Unix work had a job where I didn't have to be on-call at least part of the time. So if you can't stand the idea of having to carry a pager/cellphone/blackberry and drop everything to respond if it goes off that would be a big roadblock too. I've had to leave church, cut short dates, or come home early from sporting events due to pages before. That's part of the job unfortunately. Either that or just sit at home at all times when you are the on-call person.
Usually that responsibility rotates among the team of admins, so you may end up with a day a week or a week each month or something like that. If it is a tiny shop with only 1 or 2 admins you may be always on-call, but for small shops like that typically there aren't that many servers so pages are pretty rare. The other extreme is giant shops with dozens of admins where you don't have to be on-call because some people are always at work to handle things.
Last edited by DukeNuke2; 04-02-2009 at 01:34 PM..
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at(1) General Commands Manual at(1)
Name
at, batch - execute commands at a later time
Syntax
at time [day] [file]
at -r job...
at -l [job...]
batch [file]
Description
The and commands use a copy of the named file (standard input default) as input to or at a later time. A command to the current directory
is inserted at the beginning, followed by assignments to all environment variables. When the script is run, it uses the user and group ID
of the creator of the copy file.
The command allows the user to specify when the commands should be executed, while jobs queued with execute when the load level of the sys-
tem permits.
The environment variables, current directory, and are retained when the commands are executed. However, open files, traps, and priority
are lost.
Users are permitted to use the and commands if their name appears in the file If that file does not exist, the file is checked to determine
if the user should be denied access to and If neither file exists, only the superuser is allowed to submit a job. If only the file exists
and is empty, global usage is permitted. The files consist of one user name per line.
The time is 1 to 4 digits. It can, but does not have to be, followed by A, P, N or M which stand for AM, PM, noon or midnight, respec-
tively. The A, P, N, and M suffixes are case-insensitive. One and two digit numbers are interpreted as hours, three and four digits to be
hours and minutes. If three digits are specified, the first digit is interpreted to be an hour in the range 0-9, and the second and third
digits as minutes. If no letters follow the digits, a 24 hour clock time is presumed.
In addition to 1-4 digits, and suffixes A, P, M, N, you can also specify:
at hh:mm
at h:mm
at ham
at hpm
at noon
at midnight
The optional day is either a month name followed by a day number or by a day of the week. If the word week follows, the or command is
invoked in seven days. Both commands also recognize standard abbreviations for the days of the week and months of the year. The following
are examples of legitimate commands:
at 8am jan 24
at 1530 fr week
The programs are executed by periodic execution of the command from The granularity of depends upon how often atrun is executed. The com-
mand examines the file every minute. The file determines when is executed. The default is every 15 minutes on the 1/4 hour. Editing makes
run more or less frequently.
Standard output or error output is lost unless it is redirected.
The and commands write the job number to standard error.
Options
-r Removes jobs previously scheduled by or The number is the number reported at invocation by or Only the superuser is
allowed to remove another user's jobs.
-l Lists all job numbers for all jobs submitted by the user issuing the command. Even if the user is "root", only numbers
for jobs submitted by "root" are displayed. To see the numbers of all jobs submitted, enter the following command:
% ls -l /usr/spool/at
Restrictions
Due to the granularity of the execution of there may be bugs in scheduling jobs almost exactly 24 hours into the future.
Diagnostics
Complains about various syntax errors and times that are out of range.
Files
/usr/lib/atrun executor run by cron(8)
in /usr/spool/at:
yy.ddd.hhhh.* activity for year yy, day dd, hour hhhh.
lasttimedone last hhhh
past activities in progress
/usr/spool/at/at.allowlist of allowed users
/usr/spool/at/at.denylist of denied users
/usr/spool/at spool directory
/usr/lib/cron XOPEN compatibility
See Also
crontab(5), cron(8)
at(1)