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Many years ago, there was a Unix 'calendar' program. Every user would create their own ~/.calendar file and root would run 'calendar' once daily to send people email reminders from their ~/.calendar files.

For identification, the first part of "man calendar" shows: 

NAME 
     calendar - reminder service 

SYNOPSIS 
     calendar [-ab] [-A num] [-B num] [-f calendarfile] [-t [[[cc]yy][mm]]dd] 

DESCRIPTION 
     The calendar utility checks the current directory or the directory speci- 
     fied by the CALENDAR_DIR environment variable for a file named calendar 
     and displays lines that begin with either today’s date or tomorrow’s.  On 
     Fridays, events on Friday through Monday are displayed.

The problem: this program only lets you specify a month and day in the ~/.calendar file, and will alert you every year on that month and day.

I want to alert myself to renew my driver's license Sep 13 2019 (one month before it expires). However, if I add "Sep 13" to my ~/.calendar file, it will remind me every Sep 13, not just Sep 13 2019.

I realize there are many workarounds + newer programs that do something similar, but has the calendar program itself ever been upgraded to do this?

Barry Carter
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  • How about Dec 31 - revise .calendar file for next year? Alternately, you could do something like calendar -f .calendar-\date +%Y`` in your profile – Random832 Nov 20 '13 at 14:26

1 Answers1

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Calendar works only with day and months on both BSD and systemV version. There are some possible worksaround for example using at

at 2:44pm Jul 15 ,2016

at> echo  "remind this"|mail -s reminder user

Or better use remind

elbarna
  • 12,695