Le Club Macintosh de MontrƯal
Publication: InterFace
Issue: Unknown
Author: Eric Tremblay
Series: None
Title: Remember an Important Meeting with Calendar 
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Remember an Important Meeting with Calendar 
Eric "E.T." Tremblay
 
Have your memory cells ever let you down? Did you ever miss an important meeting or anniversary? I'm sure you answered yes to at least one of the above questions. So what are you going to do about it? You can go on as you did before, or you can use your NeXT to help you get organized.  What you need is already in your machine - the only thing holding you back from using it is knowing that it's there. This little Unix utility is called calendar and it's a part of every NeXT computer. 

What does calendar do for you? It looks for a calendar text file in your local directory, and if it finds the file it looks therein for today's date. If it finds a line with the current date, it will send you electronic mail containing the corresponding message. Found below is a simple example of the calendar text file.
 
	# Example of a calendar file located in a user's local directory. 
	# This calendar file belongs to Joe Blow. 
	# This is a remark statement. 

	January 10  This is the message that will be sent in the e-mail. 
	May 23  This is another message that will be sent... 
	September 19  Happy birthday Joe! 
 
You can make your text file as big as you want and include as many events as you wish. The only rule you have to follow is that the date be in the above format; you can use wildcards, etc. Consult the Unix documentation using the Digital Librarian with the keyword calendar for further details about the format of the file. 
 
Once your calendar file is ready, you most likely want your reminders to be sent automatically.  Well, that is not hard to do either. What you have to do is modify a file called rc.local found in the /etc directory. What this modification will do is that every time you power-up your NeXT, it will execute this script which in turn will execute the calendar command. If your NeXT computer is always on, you need to execute the calendar command using another method. Please consult the Digital Librarian with the keyword crontab. The difference is that when the NeXT is always on, it would be more appropriate to execute calendar command at a specific time on each day using the crontab file. 
 
Here's an example of what the file called rc.local found in the /etc directory looks like. What you have to do is load the rc.local file in a text editor and add the "calendar -" command to the script. Then save the edited file and the next time you boot your NeXT you will receive electronic mail reminding you of a special event (if you have an event for that day of coarse.)

	/etc/rc.local 
	# 
	# This script is for augmenting the standard startup commands. 
        # It  is 
	# executed automatically by the system during boot up. 
	# In its released form, this script does nothing. you may 
        # customize 
	# it to your heart's content. 
	# 
	# Run you own commands here 
	# 
	# (echo '.')                   >/dev/console 
	# calendar utility added here calendar - 
	# It is very important to include the "-" sign after 
        # the calendar command 
 
I hope that this article will help you take advantage of a very useful  command found in Unix library and make you more productive using your NeXT computer.