In Unix, how can I send myself reminders of events?

Note: This feature is not available on any Indiana University central systems.

In Unix, you can create a file in the home directory of your account called calendar . It should look similar to the following: 12/6/99 St. Nick's day, stuff those stockings! 4/1/00 Your shoe's untied! APRIL FOOL!!! Dec 1 Pay December rent!

Each reminder must be one line only. On most systems, these reminders are sent by a system process called cron on a daily basis, usually in the early hours of the morning. The cron process checks the top directory of all accounts on a system. If your top directory contains a calendar file with a line dated the same as the next business day, then cron sends you the entire line in a mail message.

To find out more about this feature, at the Unix shell prompt, enter: man calendar

Also see:

• In Unix, how can I get a command to execute when I log out?
• In Unix, what are at and batch, and how do I use them to submit non-interactive job requests?
• What are cron and crontab, and how do I use them?