Manual Pages  — ATRUN

The system crontab(5) file /etc/crontab must contain the line

*/5     *       *       *       *       root    /usr/libexec/atrun

so atrun is invoked every five minutes.

At every invocation, atrun starts all the jobs in the lowercase queues whose start time has elapsed. In addition, if the load average over the last minute was less than the specified limit, then a maximum of one batch job (denoted by the uppercase queues) is started.

Before starting a job, atrun checks the status of its owner's account with pam(3) and refuses to run the job if the account is unavailable, e.g., locked out or expired.