Using Calendars from the Command Line

If you’re anything like me, you always have a terminal window open. One of the reasons I do this, of course, is because it’s fast. If I want to know anything at all about my computer, all I need do is type the question. The answer, because it’s always text-based, comes back immediately. I don’t have to wait for a window to open or for a pane to scroll. Everything comes at me from a single visual direction, the bottom of my terminal window.

However, there are some occasions when a text-based response to a complicated question isn’t very helpful because it requires so much extra work to understand. For me, the most common example of this sort of issue has always been in looking at time-based information, and more specifically, calendars. Whenever I’m on my machine, I almost always need to look at a calendar.

In the past, I used to go all the way over to iCal. Sure, I can do this using keyboard shortcuts only, but sometimes all I want is a quick answer to “what date is this upcoming Friday?” In situations like that, I’ve lately begun using the cal command, and my oh my, what a timesaver.

cal is kind of like man for dates. Of course, you can get more info by saying man cal to your prompt. The cal program, installed by default on almost all UNIX-based systems (including Mac OS X), has a ton of useful options. However, most of the time, I don’t need more than a few.

For instance, let’s say I just want a calendar of the current month. I can get get a compact, simple month view instead of going to iCal by saying just cal at the command line:

Perseus:~ maymay$ cal
     April 2008
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
       1  2  3  4  5
 6  7  8  9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30

Other options let me ask other questions of cal. Easy, simple, fast. I like it.