unix at command pass variable to shell script? - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm trying to setup a simple timer that gets started from a Rails Application. This timer should wait out its duration and then start a shell script that will start up ./script/runner and complete the initial request. I need script/runner because I need access to ActiveRecord.
Here's my test lines in Rails
output = `at #{(Time.now + 60).strftime("%H:%M")} < #{Rails.root}/lib/parking_timer.sh STRING_VARIABLE`
return render :text => output
Then my parking_timer.sh looks like this
#!/bin/sh
~/PATH_TO_APP/script/runner -e development ~/PATH_TO_APP/lib/ParkingTimer.rb $1
echo "All Done"
Finally, ParkingTimer.rb reads the passed variable with
ARGV.each do|a|
puts "Argument: #{a}"
end
The problem is that the Unix command "at" doesn't seem to like variables and only wants to deal with filenames. I either get one of two errors depending on how I position "s
If I put quotes around the right hand side like so
... "~/PATH_TO_APP/lib/parking_timer.sh STRING_VARIABLE"
I get,
-bash: ~/PATH_TO_APP/lib/parking_timer.sh STRING_VARIABLE: No such file or directory
I I leave the quotes out, I get,
at: garbled time
This is all happening on a Mac OS 10.6 box running Rails 2.3 & Ruby 1.8.6
I've already messed around w/ BackgrounDrb, and decided its a total PITA. I need to be able to cancel the job at any time before it is due.

Answer 1

After playing around with irb a bit, here's what I found.
The backtick operator invokes the shell after ruby has done any interpretation necessary. For my test case, the strace output looked something like this:
execve("/bin/sh", ["sh", "-c", "echo at 12:57 < /etc/fstab"], [/* 67 vars */]) = 0
Since we know what it's doing, let's take a look at how your command will be executed:
/bin/sh -c "at 12:57 < RAILS_ROOT/lib/parking_timer.sh STRING_VARIABLE"
That looks very odd. Do you really want to pipe parking_timer.sh, the script, as input into the at command?
What you probably ultimately want is something like this:
/bin/sh -c "RAILS_ROOT/lib/parking_timer.sh STRING_VARIABLE | at 12:57"
Thus, the output of the parking_timer.sh command will become the input to the at command.
So, try the following:
output = `#{Rails.root}/lib/parking_timer.sh STRING_VARIABLE | at #{(Time.now + 60).strftime("%H:%M")}`
return render :text => output
You can always use strace or truss to see what's happening. For example:
strace -o strace.out -f -ff -p $IRB_PID
Then grep '^exec' strace.out* to see where the command is being executed.