The problem is that my slug is unslung, running busybox for most basic *nix tools and busybox’s touch command doesn’t support the -t option, so I can’t set the modification time on the file to properly queue it.  My half-assed workaround is a shell script (because I couldn’t get the System() command to run the whole string, try as I might) that nohups a background shell process that sleeps for the difference in seconds between now and the wakeup time, then creates the call file.  Not great for far-future scheduling or for large numbers of calls and it won’t survive a reboot, but it’s a start.

My Asterisk diaplan macro passes the target time/date string as the first argument, the target channel as the second, and the ${UNIQUEID} as the third.  One further wrinkle:  busybox 1.3.1, which was what came with the unslung firmware I used, doesn’t have nohup, so it won’t work; busybox 1.10.3 is what ipkg installed into /opt/ and has nohup, but the date command in 1.10.3 didn’t seem to support –date (at all, or maybe just not properly), so nohup is a reference to the 1.10.3 busybox in /opt/bin while /bin/date is a reference to the original 1.3.1 busybox.  Stupid, but it works.

(Oh, and as I told the last person I saw wearing a t-shirt that said “If it’s stupid, but it works, then it isn’t stupid,” there’s definitely such a thing as works-but-stupid–this script hackery is such a thing.  The better solution, space permitting, is probably just to install the coreutils package so as to have proper non-busybox touch and date)