CALENDAR(1)

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, cpp(1), 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

SEE ALSO
at(1), cpp(1), grep(1V), mail(1), aliases(5), cron(8)

NOTES

The `-' argument works only on calendar files that are local to the machine; calendar is intended not to 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.

calendar is no longer in the default root crontab. Because of the network burden `calendar -' can induce, it is inadvisable in an environment running ypbind (see ypserv(8)) with a large passwd.byname map. However, if the usefulness of calendar outweighs the network impact, the super-user may run `crontab -e' to edit the root crontab. Otherwise, individual users may wish to use `crontab -e' to edit their own crontabs to have cron invoke calendar without the `-' argument, piping output to mail addressed to themselves.

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 calendar mail will be sent to the user at the machine on which `calendar -' is run. If the system administrator wants the mail to be sent to another machine, mail aliases should be set up accordingly.