Quickly inspect one-time queued jobs and learn how to list, view and remove them using the atq tool. 20.02.2026 | reading time: 2 min atq is the simple command that shows the list of pending one-time jobs queued by the at system; if you schedule a job with at or batch, atq tells you what is still waiting to run. Live demo: schedule, list, inspect, remove Try this sequence to see atq in action: ```bash echo 'date > /tmp/at_test' | at now + 1 minute atq # sample output (implementation-dependent): 1 Thu Feb 20 12:34:00 2026 a user # view the job contents at -c 1 # cancel the job atrm 1 ``` Behavior that matters atq shows pending jobs for the invoking user by default and root can see all users' jobs; the output format varies between systems but always exposes a job id you can feed to atrm or to at -c to print the job script, and remember that atd must be running and that timezone or locale differences affect displayed times. When to prefer atq Use atq when you need a quick list of one-off scheduled tasks or to verify that a script queued with at will run; for recurrent jobs prefer cron or systemd timers, and for immediate backgrounding use nohup or systemd-run instead. Final encouragement Mastering small utilities like at, atq and atrm sharpens a sysadmin's ability to schedule and audit one-off tasks; explore more scheduling tools and consider certifying skills with CompTIA Linux+ or LPIC-1, and use bitsandbytes.academy for focused exam preparation. Join Bits & Bytes Academy First class LINUX exam preparation. utilities processes scripting
