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I've found some puzzle with atrm command I can't understand. The man page for at says that atrm is an alias for at -d. The file /usr/bin/atrm command says that it is a symbolic link to at.

Now if atrm is a link to at then my understanding is that atrm <jobid> and at <jobid> commands should be equivalent, but they aren't (atrm <jobid> and at -d <jobid> are), at <jobid> command just shows "Garbled time" error.

How is that? I mean how being a symbolic link to at, atrm can call at with a -d option? What do I miss?

P.S. Linux distro in question is Debian 7.3

Thank you

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  • Another example of the pattern described above is /bin/rbash symbolic link which will start bash with -r flag (restricted mode)
    – golem
    Feb 4, 2014 at 15:05

1 Answer 1

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Program code can know what the name of the executable was that launched it. It's possible that the at program does something like this:

if (my name is 'atrm') then
   add '-d' parmeter
end
do stuff like regular 'at' program.
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