Have the at command return the job id of the task just submitted

Question

Is it possible to have the at command return somehow the job id it just submitted when used from within a script? (kind of like $? retrieves the last exit code or $$/$! retrieve the PID of the command just executed).

Answer 1

Assuming that the job you want to run is in a file called test.sh, the following will return the id:

 $ at now -f test.sh 2>&1 | grep job | awk '{print $2}'
 8

The 2>&1 redirects stderr to stdout so you can manipulate it. The grep gets the job line. The awk returns the second field in the line found by grep, which contains the job id.

So it get it into a variable, you can do:

$ TEST=`at now -f test.sh 2>&1 | grep job | awk '{print $2}'`
$ echo $TEST
9