cal That Marks Today's Date

If you're like me and you tend to forget what day it is :-), a calendar like the one that cal () prints doesn't help much. Here's a little shell script below that puts angle brackets around the current date. For example, if today is August 7, 1996:

% cal August 1996 S M Tu W Th F S 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 31

If you're sure that this script will never be called by another program that expects the system version, you can name this cal, too - just be sure to put it in a directory somewhere in your PATH before /usr/bin (), the system location of most versions of cal. Otherwise, give the script another name, such as cal_today.

The script puts the output of date into its command-line parameters; it adds an x first for safety (in case the date command doesn't make any output, the set command will still have arguments and won't output a list of all shell variables). The parameters look like this:

x Wed Aug 7 20:04:04 PDT 1996

and the fourth parameter, in $4, is what the script uses:

 set "$@" 

 #! /bin/sh # If user didn't give arguments, put >
< around today's date: case $# in 0) set x `date` # Place >
< around $4 (shell expands it inside doublequotes): /usr/bin/cal | sed -e 's/^/ /' -e "s/ $4$/>$4</" -e "s/ $4 />$4</" ;; *) /usr/bin/cal "$@" ;; esac

If you give any arguments, the script assumes that you don't want the current month; it runs the system cal command. Otherwise, the script pipes the system cal output into sed (). The sed expression puts a space before every line to make room for any> < at the start of a line. Then it uses two substitute commands - one for the beginning or middle, the other for the end of a line - one is guaranteed to match the current date.

- JP