*nix has the "at" command, which can be piped to to run a program at a certain time. Like this:
echo "SOME_COMMAND" | at 00:00
Windows also has an "at" command, which creates a run-once scheduled task that runs in the background by the user SYSTEM. "schedtasks" is more complete, but also a pain to use (especially since it requires a unique name for each task, the idea of creating a batch to create a run-once task *nix style in order to mimic *nix's "at" becomes kinda unpractical).
So, is there a utility for Windows that does what *nix's "at" does, in a simple, non-hassle way?
UPDATE: I'll be more a little more specific now =). I'm trying to power off my monitor at a certain time, and I use a command-line utility called nircmd so I can simply type "nircmd monitor off" to do the job. If I used Linux on this computer, all I had to do was
echo "nircmd monitor off" | at XX:YY
or create a "macro". But in Windows I only have the scheduled tasks, which is a rather bureaucratic way of creating a run-once task, since "at" doesn't really work (see my similar question Windows Task Scheduler and possible permission problems) and "schedtasks" requires the whole unique name thing mentioned above.
Being a programmer, it should be easy enough to create such a program that mimics Unix's "at". But I wanted to make sure that I wasn't reinventing the wheel first.
at
. If you want complexity, you're stuck withschedtasks
. It's unfortunate, but that's the case. There may be a third party tool out there to make it easier, or you could just write a batch script to do it.