NAME

calendar − a simple reminder service

SYNOPSIS

calendar [ − ]

DESCRIPTION

calendar consults the file calendar in the current directory and displays lines that contain today’s or tomorrow’s date anywhere in the line.  Most reasonable month-day dates — such as ‘Dec. 7,’ ‘december 7,’ and ‘12/7’ — are recognized, but ‘7 December’ or ‘7/12’ are not.  If you give the month as ‘∗’ with a date — for example, “∗  1” — that day in any month will do.  On weekends “tomorrow” extends through Monday. 

When the optional ‘−’ argument is present, calendar does its job for every user who has a file calendar in his login directory and sends him any positive results by mail(1).  Normally this is done daily in the wee hours under control of cron(8). 

The file calendar is first run through the C preprocessor, /lib/cpp, to include any other calendar files specified with the usual #include syntax.  Included calendars are usually shared by all users, and maintained by the system administrator. 

FILES

~/calendar

/usr/lib/calendar to figure out today’s and tomorrow’s dates

/etc/passwd

/tmp/cal∗

/lib/cpp

/usr/bin/egrep

/usr/bin/sed

/usr/bin/mail

SEE ALSO

at(1), mail(1), aliases(5), cron(8)

NOTES

calendar is no longer in the default root crontab. You have to edit the crontab file to add it back if you want cron to schedule calendar as before. 

BUGS

calendar’s extended idea of “tomorrow” does not account for holidays.

Problems may occur when there is no /etc/passwd file on the local host. 

The ‘−’ argument works only on calendar files that are local to the machine, and does not work on calendar files that are mounted remotely with NFS.  Thus, ‘calendar −’ should be run only on diskful machines where home directories exist;  running it on a diskless client has no effect.  The calendar mail will be sent to the user at the machine on which ‘calendar −’ is run.  If the user wants the mail to be sent to another machine, mail aliases should be set up properly. 

Sun Release 4.0  —  Last change: 22 March 1989