CALENDAR(1) BSD Reference Manual CALENDAR(1)
calendar - reminder service
calendar [-abP] [-A num] [-B num] [-f calendarfile] [-t [[[cc]yy][mm]]dd]
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 options are as follows:
-A num Print lines from today and next num days (forward, future).
-a Process the "calendar" files of all users and mail the results to
them. This requires superuser privileges.
-B num Print lines from today and previous num days (backward, past).
-b Enforce special date calculation mode for Cyrillic calendars.
-f calendarfile
Use calendarfile ('-' for stdin) as the default calendar file.
-P Parse the entire calendar file and convert it to an output format
intended to be consumed by calendar format conversion utilities,
representing the information from the original entries including
year and time-of-day extensions (see below). When given twice,
the original first line is also quoted before each event heading.
-t [[[cc]yy][mm]]dd
Act like the specified value is "today" instead of using the
current date.
To handle calendars in different encodings, specify "LANG=<locale_name>"
in the calendar file as early as possible. That being said, there are no
locales on MirBSD so calendar handles locale_name as country.encoding;
country is used to make some special handling available, and encoding is
used to convert the entries to UTF-8.
National names for special days can be handled by adding lines such as
"Advent=<national_name>" (for the Western Church first Sunday of Advent),
"Easter=<national_name>" (for Catholic Easter), "Paskha=<national_name>"
(for Orthodox Easter) or "Pesach=<national_name>" (for Jewish Passover),
setting the corresponding variables.
The "CALENDAR" variable can be used to specify the style. Only 'Julian'
and 'Gregorian' styles are currently supported. Use "CALENDAR=" to return
to the default (Gregorian).
To enforce special date calculation mode for Cyrillic calendars specify
"LANG=<locale_name>" and "BODUN=<bodun_prefix>" where <locale_name> can
be ru_RU.KOI8-R, uk_UA.KOI8-U, by_BY.KOI8-B or their .UTF-8 counterparts.
To enable specific anniversary handling, applied to all complete event
texts that start with a four-digit year plus comma and space, or that end
with comma and space and a four-digit year, appending a formatted text
instead, set "ANNIV=<ago_text><us><cur_text><us><future_text>" (where us
is the ASCII unit separator (Ctrl-_, 0x1F) and the texts are used if the
event happened in the past, present or future, respectively; "%1$d" and
"%2$d" in the texts are replaced by the year and the absolute year delta
respectively), or use "ANNIV=1" which enables this mode using the default
"%1$d: %2$d year(s) ago", "%1$d: this year", "%1$d: in %2$d year(s)" if
none are specified otherwise. Some crazy Russian formats are also parsed,
conflating "-e" ('s) and "G" (year), ignoring "do n.e." (BCE).
Other lines should begin with a month and day. They may be entered in al-
most any format, either numeric or as character strings. If proper locale
is set, national months and weekdays names can be used (not on MirBSD
which does not support locales). A single asterisk ('*') matches every
month. A day without a month matches that day of every week. A month
without a day matches the first of that month. Two numbers default to the
month followed by the day. Lines with leading tabs default to the last
entered date, allowing multiple line specifications for a single date.
Advent, Easter, Paskha and Pesach, both these standard English and the
user-defined national (see above) names, correspond to the respective
special day for this year; they may be followed by a positive (with an
explicit '+') or negative integer to offset the day. Weekday names may be
followed by "-4" ... "+5" (aliases last, first, second, third, fourth)
for moving events like "the last Monday in April".
By convention, dates followed by an asterisk ('*') are not fixed, i.e.
change from year to year.
Day descriptions start after the first <tab> character in the line; if
the line does not contain a <tab> character, it isn't printed out. If the
first character in the line is a <tab> character, it is treated as the
continuation of the previous description.
Day descriptions may begin with a four-digit year (between 1000 and 2999)
followed by a comma and space, and/or a time-of-day descriptor followed
by a space (in either case, at least one other character is required).
This is mostly useful in -P (conversion) mode, but the leading year is
picked up by anniversary processing (see above) as well, and the user may
appreciate this information anyway. A time-of-day specification shall be
starttime[dash[endtime]][open-bracket timezone close-bracket] where
starttime and endtime are 24-hour specifications (e.g. 01:23), dash is
either ASCII '-' hyphen-minus or U+2013 EN DASH), open-bracket is '[',
close-bracket is ']' and timezone is an Olson tzdata identifier. 24-hour
specifications go from 00:00 to 23:59; 24:00 is additionally recognised
but mapped to 23:59 so events stay within one day.
The parse-and-extract mode output format is as follows, suppressing the
normal output:
- quoted original line
If -PP is used, the original first line of an event specification
(the one that does not start with a tab), prefixed by '>', is
output first (unchanged but preprocessed).
- metadata line (event heading)
This line is comprised of the following fields:
variable-day marker
Either an asterisk '*' (if calendar would otherwise have
printed one) or an equals sign '='. This field, unlike
all others, is not followed by a space.
date YYYY-MM-DD formatted date of either the first occurrence
within a given year, if a year is part of the extended
day description (see above), or the next occurrence after
or starting with "today" (see above).
recurrence mode
This is normally one of yearly, monthly or weekly. Yearly
events with a given year in the extended day description
change to once. Events whose days are based on a special
calculation (Advent, Easter, etc.) are special instead,
independent on whether they would occur once or yearly.
recurrence frequency
Special events show the English name (Advent, Easter,
Paskha, Pesach), followed by either a plus or minus, and
a number (offset in days). Yearly and once events show
-mm-dd or -mm,www+n where mm is the month number (01 to
12), dd is the day number (01 to 31), www is the weekday
(Sun, Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat), and +n is either
plus or minus and a number, showing the first (+1),
second (+2), etc. or last (-1), penultimate (-2), etc.
occurrence of the given weekday in a month. Monthly
events show dd if they recur on the same day-of-month
number, and www+n if they recur on one given weekday each
month. Weekly events show www.
year Either an asterisk ('*') or a four-digit year number.
start and end times and timezone
This is either one field, literally whole-day, or two
fields, optionally followed by a third. The first field
is a time as hh:mm; the second field either an "at" '@'
(denoting no end time was given) or a time as hh:mm. The
third field (if present) is a timezone name (see above).
- description
One or more lines prefixed by a tab character. Together, they
comprise the day description with the extended part removed. Line
breaks are the same as in the calendar file.
https://github.com/mirabilos/ev-useful/tree/master/cal2ics is a sample
postprocessor converting this format to iCalendar (*.ics) format.
The calendar file is preprocessed by cpp(1), allowing the inclusion of
shared files such as company holidays or meetings. If the shared file is
not referenced by a full pathname, cpp(1) searches in the current (or
home) directory first, and then in the directory /usr/share/calendar.
Empty lines and C comments (/* ... */) are ignored.
Some possible calendar entries (a \t sequence denotes a <tab> character):
LANG=C
Easter=Ostern
#include <calendar.usholiday>
#include <calendar.birthday>
6/15\tJune 15 (if ambiguous, will default to month/day).
Jun. 15\tJune 15.
15 June\tJune 15.
Thursday\tEvery Thursday.
June\tEvery June 1st.
15 *\t15th of every month.
May Sun+2\tsecond Sunday in May (Muttertag)
04/SunLast\tlast Sunday in April,
\tsummer time in Europe
Easter\tEaster
Ostern-2\tGood Friday (2 days before Easter)
Paskha\tOrthodox Easter
Advent+21\t4th Sunday of Advent
calendar File in current directory.
~/.etc/calendar Directory in the user's home directory (which
calendar changes into, if it exists).
~/.etc/calendar/calendar File to use if no calendar file exists in the
current directory.
~/.etc/calendar/nomail calendar will not mail if this file exists.
calendar.all International and national calendar files.
calendar.birthday Births and deaths of famous (and not-so-famous)
people.
calendar.christian Christian holidays (should be updated yearly by
the local system administrator so that roving
holidays are set correctly for the current
year).
calendar.computer Computer people's days of special significance.
calendar.croatian Croatian calendar.
calendar.fictional Fantasy and fiction dates (mostly LOTR).
calendar.french French calendar.
calendar.german German calendar.
calendar.history Everything else, mostly U.S. historical events.
calendar.holiday Other holidays (including the not-well-known,
obscure, and really obscure).
calendar.judaic Jewish holidays (should be updated yearly by
the local system administrator so that roving
holidays are set correctly for the current
year).
calendar.music Musical events, births, and deaths (strongly
oriented toward rock'n'roll).
calendar.openbsd OpenBSD and MirBSD related events.
calendar.pagan Pagan holidays, celebrations and festivals.
calendar.russian Russian calendar.
calendar.usholiday U.S. holidays.
calendar.world World wide calendar.
at(1), cal(1), cpp(1), mail(1), cron(8)
The evolvis.org "useful-scripts" repository.
The calendar program previously selected lines which had the correct date
anywhere in the line. This is no longer true: the date is only recognised
when it occurs at the beginning of a line.
A calendar command appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX.
Since MirBSD #10, if the UNICODE variable is set during compilation,
iconv(3) is used to convert any input to UTF-8 output.
ANNIV and Advent handling appeared in MirBSD #11. Other implementations
silently ignore the field assignment, so ANNIV is backwards-compatible.
calendar doesn't handle all Jewish holidays or moon phases.
The lunar calendar is recognised but not implemented.
MirBSD #10-current December 17, 2021 3