The Tool Shed: leave
The Story
It's been another long Friday at the office. You've keep your nose the grind (monitor?) working on a report all afternoon. You haven't even had time to keep an eye on the clock ... but your friend waiting for you at the pub certainly has.
You get there in a rush, an hour or so late, and make some apologies about losing track of time. Naturally, the discussion quickly comes around to reminder software. There's all kinds of great solutions - but you're an old console jockey, and prefer not to run the X Window system if you can avoid it.
``Well then,'' he says, ``I guess you'd have to use leave.''
Doing a quick mental grep, you have to confess ignorance of the command. ``Ok, what is it?'' you ask.
``Just the simpliest reminder system around,'' your buddy smugly tells you. ``Let's assume that you want to leave at 4:00pm. You'd simply run leave 1600 (it uses the HHMM time format) and when the timer runs out, you'll get this at your shell prompt:
[tillman@coyote tillman]$ Time to leave!
``Sounds great,'' you say, ``but I'll never remember to use it. It's a catch-22 ... if I was organized enough to remember to use it, I'd be organized enough not to need it.''
Your buddy thinks for a moment. ``What if you stuck leave in your shell's login script with no command-line options? That way, when you first login in the morning, it'll present you with a prompt like this:''
When do you have to leave?
``Then you can either enter in when you want the leave (in HHMM format) or just hit the enter key if you don't want a reminder that day'', he continues.
``Sounds like a plan,'' you say, with visions of getting to McNally's tavern on time in your mind.
The Details
leave is including with FreeBSD (in the /usr/bin directory) as part of the base operating system. According to the man page, it first appeared in 3.0BSD. It's likely that any BSD-derived operating system should have it.
The Wrap-up
Happy that you can now make it to the pub on time, you mull over how you could use leave to get the rest of your life a little more organized. You could use some fancy shell scripting to run multiple copies of leave to give reminders of meetings throughout the day and .... no, it's just not the right tool for that job. leave is great at what it does, but some kind of console schedule or calendar application would be needed to do a full days schedule.
If only there was a nice article on console calendar applications ...
