Recently, on my CentOS server, I had my system error log at /var/log/messages flooded with a whole heap of lines like the one below.

server01 atd[13653]: File a0001001567d06 is in wrong format – aborting

Naturally, this continued until the server ran out of disk space and died. I couldn’t work out how the issue actually originated however, I managed to fix the issue by deleting the at job that was failing.

The following commands fixed the problem for me.

First of all use atq to find out the job number.

# atq a0001001567d06

You should get a response similar to the one below. The first number is the job number you need to run the next command.

16 2012-09-04 00:38 a root

Using the job number from above, run atrm to remove the troublesome job

# atrm 16

Problem solved!