at command

[IRI Unix Support Team]

Is there a way to disable at command mailing feature for non root user?

[Brian M Rawlings]

One way would be to disable non-root access to 'at', but give them access to a script named 'at', which calls the real 'at', with whatever options you allow/provide.

Without the source for 'at', and unsupported fiddling at the program level, I don't know of any way to restrict access to some functions of a command. It is easy to restrict or allow access to commands, but, below that level of control, the method I described above may be your only bet.

Maybe somebody else will have a better idea...?

Regards, --bmr

[John Palmer]

As with any other cron issued job, anything sent to standard output or standard error will be sent as a mail to the relevant user.

The way to stop it is to ensure that all output is sent to either an alternative log file or /dev/null.

If it's a simple command you can do something like:-

at ...
command > yourfile 2>&1
ctrl D

yourfile could be /dev/null.

Alternatively, you can use exec to redirect standard output and standard error:-

at ...
exec 1>yourfile 2>&1
commands
...
ctrl D

Regards,
John

[Shannon Petry]

NO, not in the normal sense anyway.

Why? at and cron are just job wrappers. While they email the output of the job, the output is not from cron, but the commands/script a user schedules with at/cron.

In crontab, we can bypass mail features by re-directing output. The same with at.

Unless you want to replace at with a wrapper (which could be a nightmare depending on what your users are scheduling), just have them append their jobs output to /dev/null.

Regards,
Shannon