Send Yourself Reminder Mail

I use the at command () to send myself reminders. The at job runs a mail program () and feeds the body of the message to the mailer's standard input. Examples:

To send a one-line reminder, I use a one-line command like this:
```
% at 0427 tuesday at> echo "send summary to Tim today" | mail jpeek@jpeek.com at> [CTRL-d] %
```
It sends mail at (in this case) 4:27 a.m. on the next Tuesday. The mail says: "send summary to Tim today."

To send more than one line, you can use a temporary file:

% vi msgfile put message body in msgfile... % at 0808 feb 28 at> mail jpeek@jpeek.com < msgfile at> rm msgfile at> [CTRL-d] %

Combine the output of UNIX commands and text with backquotes () and a here document ():
```
% at 0115 at> mail -s "Hard-working people" tom << END at> These employees are working late. They deserve a bonus: at> `w` at> END at> [CTRL-d] %
```
That sends a message to tom at 1:15 a.m. tonight. (This mailer accepts a subject on the command line with its -s option. The output of the w command gives detailed information about logged-in users; not all systems have it.) Unless you understand how to quote here-document text (), the message shouldn't have anything but letters, numbers, commas, and periods.

If your system administrator has set up the calendar () program, it's good for easy one-line reminders on particular days. If your UNIX has personal crontabs () that can send periodic reminders every Tuesday, every hour, or whatever: use the commands in items 1 or 2 above.

- JP