keeping jobs running unattended - vax BSD 4.3

[Paulo L de Geus]

I would like to know how to do this.  What I wish is to have a job
running as soon as (or soon after) the machine is rebooted, whenever it
happens, which is quite frequent and unexpected.  I can think of juggling
with "at" jobs, but I need to be certain that I have only a single copy of
the job running.  Alternatively, if I could set a shell variable visible to
all copies of the script that could show up (I'm not sure if this is
possible) I would be able to kill unwanted copies.

The job will be a small shell script that renames a few files according to
some state of the machine (actually the mail queue).  I may sometimes edit
the files involved when I'm logged in and would like not to be fouled up by
the underlying script, though I guess a warning plus a 1 minute sleep
before the action will do fine.

Please keep in mind that this is supposed to work for a user, not for a
system manager.

Any ideas on how to set appropriate things to accomplish this will be much
appreciated. 

Replies to my address please.  I'll forward answers to interested people.

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Paulo L de Geus		   JANET: paulo at uk.ac.man.cs.ux
Dept of Computer Science   Internet: paulo%ux.cs.man.ac.uk at nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Univ of Manchester         UUCP:...!uunet!mcvax!ukc!man.cs.ux!paulo
Manchester M13 9PL  U.K.   BITNET: paulo at ux.cs.man.ac.uk