calendar(1)

NAME

calendar — reminder service

SYNOPSIS

calendar [-]

DESCRIPTION

calendar consults the file calendar in the current directory and prints out lines containing today's or tomorrow's date anywhere in the line. On weekends, ``tomorrow'' extends through Monday.

When a - command-line argument is present, calendar searches for the file calendar in each user's home directory, and sends any positive results to the user by mail (see mail(1)). Normally this is done daily in the early morning hours under the control of cron (see cron(1M)). When invoked by cron, calendar reads the first line in the calendar file to determine the user's environment.

Language-dependent information such as spelling and date format (described below) are determined by the user-specified LANG statement in the calendar file. This statement should be of the form LANG=language where language is a valid language name (see lang(5)). If this line is not in the calendar file, the action described in the EXTERNAL INFLUENCES Environment Variable section is taken.

calendar is concerned with two fields: month and day. A month field can be expressed in three different formats: a string representing the name of the month (either fully spelled out or abbreviated), a numeric month, or an asterisk (representing any month). If the month is expressed as a string representing the name of the month, the first character can be either upper-case or lower-case; other characters must be lower-case. The spelling of a month name should match the string returned by calling nl_langinfo() (see nl_langinfo(3C)). The day field is a numeric value for the day of the month.

Month-Day Formats

If the month field is a string, it can be followed by zero or more blanks. If the month field is numeric, it must be followed by either a slash (/) or a hyphen (-). If the month field is an asterisk (*), it must be followed by a slash (/). The day field can be followed immediately by a blank or non-digit character.

Day-Month Formats

The day field is expressed as a numeral. What follows the day field is determined by the format of the month. If the month field is a string, the day field must be followed by zero or one dot (.) followed by zero or more blanks. If the month field is a numeral, the day field must be followed by either a slash (/) or a hyphen (-). If the month field is an asterisk, the day field must be followed by a slash (/).

EXTERNAL INFLUENCES

Environment Variables

LC_TIME determines the format and contents of date and time strings when no LANG statement is specified in the calendar file.

LANG determines the language in which messages are displayed.

If LC_TIME is not specified in the environment or is set to the empty string, the value of LANG is used as a default for each unspecified or empty variable. If LANG is not specified or is set to the empty string, a default of "C" (see lang(5)) is used instead of LANG. If any internationalization variable contains an invalid setting, calendar behaves as if all internationalization variables are set to "C". See environ(5).

International Code Set Support

Single- and multi-byte character code sets are supported.

EXAMPLES

The following calendar file illustrates several formats recognized by calendar:

LANG=en_US.roman8 
Friday, May 29th: group coffee meeting 
meeting with Boss on June 3. 
3/30/87 - quarter end review 
4-26 Management council meeting at 1:00 pm 
It is first of the month ( */1 ); status report due. 

In the following calendar file, dates are expressed according to European English usage:

LANG=en_GB.roman8 
On 20 Jan. code review 
Jim's birthday is on the 3. February 
30/3/87 - quarter end review 
26-4 Management council meeting at 1:00 pm 
It is first of the month ( 1/* ); status report due. 

WARNINGS

To get reminder service, either your calendar must be public information or you must run calendar from your personal crontab file, independent of any calendar - run systemwide. Note that if you run calendar yourself, the calendar file need not reside in your home directory.

calendar's extended idea of ``tomorrow'' does not account for holidays.

This command is likely to be withdrawn from X/Open standards. Applications using this command might not be portable to other vendors' platforms.

AUTHOR

calendar was developed by AT&T and HP.

FILES

calendar
/tmp/cal*
/usr/lbin/calprog: to figure out today's and tomorrow's dates
/usr/bin/crontab
/etc/passwd

STANDARDS CONFORMANCE

calendar: SVID2, SVID3, XPG2, XPG3