The ‘nohup’ command is good if you are connected to an SSH server and you want the command to remain running after logging out of the SSH session.

Imagine you want to run that same command at a specific point in time.

The ‘at‘ command allows you to do just that. ‘at’ can be used as follows.

at 10:38 PM Fri
at> cowsay ‘hello’
at> CTRL + D

The above command will run the program cowsay at 10:38 PM on Friday evening.

The syntax is ‘at’ followed by the date and time to run.

When the at> prompt appears, enter the command you want to run at the specified time.

The CTRL + D returns you to the cursor.

There are lots of different date and time formats and it is worth checking the man pages for more ways to use ‘at’.