calendar - Personal calendar
calendar [ -e ] [ eventfile ]
Calendar reminds you of upcoming events. The events are displayed when calendar is called, usually from the login script.
To set up a list of events, you must create a file called “events” in your user directory. Example:
DOW Dy Mon Yr *** 15 Aug ** National Frozen Pizza Day Wed! ** Sep ** Dart League, 11:30 PM +10! 31 Oct ** Start working on Halloween costume ***! 7 Dec ** File:daves.birthday END
The first line must be included exactly as shown, or calendar will ignore the entire file. Each event entry consists of two lines, a date line and a message line. The date line can include wildcard characters for a “don’t care” situation. The date line must be formatted exactly as shown, or that event will be ignored. A maximum of 99 events can be stored.
In the example above, the first event is to occur on August 15th, with the day of week and year ignored. If calendar is called on August 15th, the message “National Frozen Pizza Day” will be displayed.
If calendar is called on any Wednesday in September, the second event is triggered, and the message “Dart League, 11:00 PM” is displayed.
The third event is an example of look-ahead. The first character on the date line is a “+”, followed by the number of days advance notice required (up to 99). In the example, the message “Start working on Halloween costume” will be displayed every day between October 21 and October 31, along with a countdown of the number of days until the event occurs. After October 31, the message will no longer be displayed. Wildcards may be used in combination with look-ahead. When wildcards are used with look-ahead, calendar will check the following month or year if appropriate. For example:
+10! 5 *** ** Pay phone bill
This event would be displayed from about the 25th of the month (depending on which month) through the 5th of the following month. If the current date is December 31, “5 days until:” will be displayed, since calendar will look past the end of the year.
The last three examples show a feature new to v1.5 - auto-delete. If the fourth character of the date line is a “!”, the event will be saved after it is displayed. If the “!” is missing, the event will be deleted after it is displayed. For look-ahead events, the event will not be deleted until the actual date occurs.
The last line of the file must be “END” by itself, or calendar will give an error.
The “events” file can also be created and edited with the built-in editor. To use the editor, invoke calendar with the -e parameter. The editor is quite self-explanatory.
Version 1.6 includes an improved editor and adds two new features: alternate eventfile, and textfile display.
The alternate eventfile works just like the main one, except the filename must be used when calling calendar. Simply use “calendar alt.events” or “calendar -e alt.events”. The alternate events file may use any legal filename, and there is no limit to the number of alternate files.
The textfile display feature allows you to display any textfile as the message for a given event. This makes it easy to add multiple events for a particular day, or to make a special sign. To use this feature, enter “File:filename” as the message text for that day (as shown in the fourth example).