Schedule Win32 Perl Scripts with AT

Introduction

at.exe is a commandline scheduler on Win32, similar in concept to *nix cron and at. It's run from a cmd.exe window, and allows you to add, remove, and view scheduled commands. Other tools exist for MS-Windows scheduling, but are outside the scope of this document.

Examples

(at time /date command)

at 2:00 /every:Th C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe C:\perls\foo.pl --options --and --arguments

at 14:00 /next:T C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe C:\perls\foo.pl --options --and --arguments

Caveats

Perl-Specific

at.exe evidently runs in an environment with no path to perl.exe. Therefore the script must be called in this form: drive:\path\to\perl drive:\path\to\script.pl

General

cmd.exe commands apparantly cannot exceed 256 characters. See Win32::AdminMisc below to get around this.
at.exe is included only in true 32bit versions of MS-Windows (NT, 2k, XP), and isn't part of 16bit versions of MS-Windows (3.(0|1)|9(5|8)|me). If one of the latter group is your development platform, you have my deepest condolances. %^P

Mistakes in this doc are quite possible - corrections, additions, and rotton kiwifruit welcome. Well, maybe not the rotton fruit.

Introduction

Examples

Caveats

Perl-Specific

General

See Also

PerlMonks

Roth

ActiveState

CPAN

Microsoft support

Local help