Previously, we used
remind to calculate the next Thanksgivukkah (co-occurrence of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah). Today, we will learn to use remind for a much more typical use case, birthdays and anniversaries. But we are going to take it a little bit further and write some useful scripts using remind to send us reminders by email and as a pop-up on your desktop. I'm doing this a bit differently here, stringing several things together, so you can look through for the things you want, or you can follow through from beginning to end to get a tutorial that will introduce you not only to the specific tools used here, but also to programming via shell scripts. This tutorial should be simple enough to follow even if you don't have programming experience.
So, what can you find here?
- Basic usage of remind for birthdays and anniversaries
- Using kdialog, gdialog, and zenity for pop-ups
- Sending email from the command line with mail
- Checking local mail with Mutt or Thunderbird
- Scheduling tasks with cron
- Writing simple shell scripts with Bash
Below you will find sections dedicated to remind, the pop-up script, and then the mail script. We will be learning shell scripting through the pop-up and mail script sections. At the end of each, we will look at using cron to run the script automatically on a schedule. Then we'll see how to check local mail with Mutt or Thunderbird, and to forward system messages to your user. Finally, I'll present the complete scripts for review (or for those who just want to skip to the code). Let's dive in and have some fun!
Remind
Creating reminders for birthdays and anniversaries
The first thing we need to do is create a reminder file containing the birthdays and anniversaries. This is plain text file, so use any text editor you are comfortable with. Let us suppose that Justin Smith was born January 31, 1987. To create a reminder for his birthday, we write a line like this:
REM 31 JAN MSG Justin Smith's [ord(year(trigdate())-1987)] Birthday
Whoa! That looks a bit complicated; let's break it down. All reminders start with
REM and this one occurs every 31st of January. The
MSG means that when the reminder is triggered (on the 31st of January), it will produce a message. You can probably guess what the part in brackets should produce in the final message, but it may still not be quite clear what is happening. Since this section is nested, we will work from the innermost pieces outward. The
trigdate() function gives the date on which the reminder was triggered. In 2014, that will be January 31, 2014. The
year() function takes just the year portion out of a date, so
year(trigdate()) is 2014. Subtracting Justin's birth year gives us 27, which is of course how old he is this year. The
ord() function turns a number into an ordinal, that is, 1 becomes 1st, 2 becomes 2nd, 3 becomes 3rd, 27 becomes 27th, etc. Ordinarily, remind is expecting the message to consist simply of words to be printed, the square brackets tell remind that what is inside is code to be evaluated and the result is to be pasted into the message before it's printed.
And so we write a line the same way for each birthday. Anniversaries are, of course, quite similar. This file doesn't have to be in a particular place or have a particular name since we pass it to remind on the command line, so we will just save it somewhere convenient. For our scripts, that file name will be included in our code when we run the remind command.
Getting the reminders for the day, week, or month
If all you give the remind command is the file with your reminders, it simply prints the reminders for today:
remind /path/to/reminders.txt
We can also print a calendar with reminders on it. To print the calendar for the next month, all we need is:
remind -c /path/to/reminders.txt
To print more than one month, just put the desired number after the
-c, so to print a calendar for the next 12 month we use:
remind -c12 /path/to/reminders.txt
Now, if we only want a week (or number of weeks) we use a
+ after
-c (but before any number):
remind -c+ /path/to/reminders.txt
These calendars all have "lines" drawn with
ascii characters (like hyphens, vertical bars, and plus symbols). We can make them look nicer with smooth, unbroken lines using unicode by adding a
u after the
-c. So to print a nicer version of the current week reminders:
remind -cu+ /path/to/reminders.txt
To learn more about remind, read the manual with:
man remind
Popups
There are a number of convenient programs that allow you to use graphical dialogs to interact with shell scripts. In this case, we simply want to generate an informational pop-up to remind us of the birthdays and anniversaries today.
I'm using kdialog which comes with KDE because that is the desktop environment I'm currently using. If you are using Gnome or another GTK desktop environment, and your system has gdialog available, the same syntax will work with it. If your system has the newer zenity instead of gdialog, the syntax is slightly different so I'll show that as well.
kdialog --title "Today's Reminders" --msgbox "Justin Smith's 27th birthday"
This example is pretty simple, the string after
--title sets the title of the pop-up window, and the string after
--msgbox is the message in the pop-up. Of course, when we put this into a script, we'll actually get the reminders from remind, and we will see how to pass that to kdialog (or gdialog or zenity) later.
As noted, gdialog would be the same, but zenity is slightly different:
zenity --title="Today's Reminders" --info --text="Justin Smith's 27th birthday"
Putting it together in a shell script
In this step we are actually writing our own computer program! It's not that scary, though. These will be very short and simple. Shell scripts are essentially a series of commands that you could have typed in at the command line, but they are written in a file that can be run as a program. The first thing we need is a line that tells the system how to run our program, that is, what other program is needed to interpret our commands:
#!/usr/bin/bash
Those first two characters are magic. No really, they represent what is called a magic number which indicates to Unix-like systems that the file contains a script and the path to the interpreter follows on the same line. Whenever the system sees a file starting with
#! the next thing it looks for is a path to the program it needs to run the commands in the rest of the file. In this case, we are using Bash which is usually located at
/usr/bin/bash.
Now we need to get the reminders for today from remind, and pass them to kdialog (or gdialog or zenity). For convenience, we will store the reminders we get from remind in a variable.
MSG=$(remind /path/to/reminders.txt)
There are two things going on here. The equal sign allows us to use the string on the left later to represent the thing to the right. In Bash, when we use that string later as a reference, we will put a
$ in front of it to indicate we are using it as a variable to represent something else.
The next thing happening here is that the
$() indicate that we want to run the command inside and substitute the
output of the command here. This is called command substitution, because we are substituting the output of the command for the command itself. So later when we reference
$MSG, it won't mean "remind /path/to/reminders.txt", it will mean "Justin Smith's 27th birthday". Now our kdialog command looks like:
kdialog --title "Today's Reminders" --msgbox "$MSG"
Now, if it's not anyone's birthday or anniversary, this will produce a pop-up that says, "No reminders." We probably don't want this, so let's add a condition so that it will only create a pop-up if we actually have a reminder. Here is how we do that in Bash:
if [[ "$MSG" != "No reminders." ]]; then
kdialog --title "Today's Reminders" --msgbox "$MSG"
fi
If you are used to other programming languages like C, C++, JavaScript, Perl, etc, this may look a little strange; if you don't have any programming experience, it probably looks rather complicated. I won't go into all of the details, but let's break down the basics. The if-then part of the construct mirrors standard English usage. The double square brackets indicate that what is inside is some kind of test. As in many programming languages,
== is used to test whether two things are equal. In this case,
!= tests whether two things are
not equal. We will only do the things that come after
then if the message in
$MSG is
not "No reminders." If it is, then we will not produce a pop-up. Note that the spacing is important, there are spaces between the brackets and what is inside, and between the
!= and the two things it is comparing. We end the conditional part of our code with
fi (the opposite of
if), so if there was any code after that, it would be run regardless of what
$MSG turned out to be.
So far we have:
#!/usr/bin/bash
MSG=$(remind /path/to/reminders.txt)
if [[ "$MSG" != "No reminders." ]]; then
kdialog --title "Today's Reminders" --msgbox "$MSG"
fi
Now, if you run this script from a terminal in your graphical desktop environment, it will work fine. But if you go to a virtual terminal (CTRL + ALT + F1, etc) and run it from there, you will get an error, "cannot connect to X server". The X server is what is responsible for drawing all of those windows, icons, etc that make up your graphical interface. And on a multi-user system, there could be several different displays at once, so it isn't sure what to connect to unless you tell it. Now if there are several users who could be logged into a graphical desktop and the same time using a switch user feature, which display is yours may depend on who logged in first. Since we don't know in advance what it will be, we need a way to find what it is.
There is a useful tool for obtaining the information we need, simply called w. It shows us who is logged into the system and what they are doing, including which X server display they are using. The problem is that it gives us more information than we need, so we will have to cut out just the relevant piece. There are a couple of tools we can use to cut out the parts we want, but before I get into those details, let me introduce you to the Unix pipe. What we need to do here is take the output of one program and pass it on to another (and then pass it's output on to yet another program). All Unix-type systems provide a simple way to do this. It is called a pipe because conceptually we are piping the output of one command directly into the input of the next. The syntax is very simple, we simply join the commands with a
| symbol.
The first thing we will do is to find a line that has the information we are looking for. It needs to contain the user name and an X display number (if you log in from a virtual terminal or via ssh, there will be no display number associated with that login). First, let's find only the lines that have an X display number. We will use grep, a tool that has powerful pattern matching abilities and works line by line. Each X display number starts with a colon and a digit. But if we look just for a colon and a digit, we could be picking up lines that don't have an X display number but just have a time formatted with a colon. To avoid that, let's look for space in front of the colon instead of a digit. OK, now that we know what we are looking for in our first step, let's see how we do it:
w | grep "\s:[0-9]"
Without going into all of the details of how grep works, I'll just explain the patterns used here. The
\s represents some kind of whitespace, such as a space or tab. The
: simply represents a literal colon. The
[0-9] looks for anything in the range of 0-9, a digit.
Now the next thing we need to find is lines that begin with the correct username. For this, we will use grep a second time. Just using the username for the second pattern would probably work, but we can protect against some odd cases by using a slightly more complicated pattern:
w | grep "\s:[0-9]" | grep -m1 "^username\s"
We already know that the
\s represents whitespace, so this prevents us from picking up a longer username that actually begins with your user name (eg- if your username is jon, you don't want the script to try to send your reminders to a user named jonathan). The
^ means the beginning of the line, so if your user name is ash you won't get a line for some other user running bash, etc. The
-m1 option returns only the first matching line. Since all of the lines for a user at this point have the same X display number, simply taking the first will do.
Finally, we need to cut just the X display number out of the line we have selected. We will use a very powerful program called awk (it's so powerful you can write whole scripts with it, but we will only look at what we need here):
w | grep "\s:[0-9]" | grep -m1 "^username\s" | awk '{print $3}'
This bit is simple enough, the
$3 represents the third field, where fields are separated by whitespace, and this is the part that awk will print to it's output.
Now, the commands that generate pop-ups automatically look for the X display number in a special kind of variable, an environment variable, called DISPLAY. We set that using a command called export, and we will use command substitution the same way we did when storing the output of remind:
export DISPLAY=$(w | grep "\s:[0-9]" | grep -m1 "^username\s" | awk '{print $3}')
Finally, we have all of the pieces, but I'm going to suggest a couple more tweaks to the remind command we are using. It won't make a difference with what we are doing here, but if you have more advanced reminders in use, the
-q option tells remind not to queue timed reminders for later execution and the
-g option will sort them by date, time, and priority. So here is what we have now:
#!/usr/bin/bash
export DISPLAY=$(w | grep "\s:[0-9]" | grep -m1 "^username\s" | awk '{print $3}')
MSG=$(remind /path/to/reminders.txt)
if [[ "$MSG" != "No reminders." ]]; then
kdialog --title "Today's Reminders" --msgbox "$MSG"
fi
Making it run automatically
While the script we have written is certainly handy, we don't want to have to run it every day, the point was to make it automatic. So now we are going to learn how to schedule a command to run on a recurring basis. The scheduler on a Unix-type system is called cron and the configuration file that specifies what commands to run and when is called a crontab. To edit your crontab, just run:
crontab -e
The format of the crontab file is a bit obtuse. Each line begins with a series of characters indicating the minute, hour, day of the month, month, and day of the week for the command to be run on. An asterisk indicates that any value is acceptable. So, to run our pop-up script every day we would use:
0 0 * * * /path/to/reminderpopup.sh
This will run the script at midnight. If we wanted to wait and have it run at 8AM, we would use:
0 8 * * * /path/to/reminderpopup.sh
Mail
Now, let's try a script that generates a calendar of upcoming events and mails them to us. I won't get into configuring your system to send email, but your system is probably configured by default to deliver mail
locally, to users on the same system. If your system isn't going to be configured to deliver email to the outside world, or hasn't been yet, you can send mail to user@localhost.
We've already seen how to generate a calendar of the reminders for the coming month, or the current week. It turns out, there is a handy command for sending email which is simply called mail. The body of your message is sent to the command's standard input, so we will use a pipe, just like we did earlier. There is a convenient way to combine the output of several commands so that you can pipe them all into the same command by wrapping the commands in curly braces. So, we can send a reminder email with something like:
{
echo "Here are your weekly reminders:";
remind -c+ /path/to/reminders.txt;
} | mail -s "Weekly reminders" user@localhost
The
-s option provides the subject for the email. Now, we could make that calendar look nicer with unicode, but standard email is ascii so if we just throw some unicode in there all we will get is garbage. In order to send unicode email, we need to specify the encoding in a header. We can add an arbitrary header to the email with the
-a option. Here is what we need to use a unicode calendar in our email:
{
echo "Here are your weekly reminders:";
remind -cu+ /path/to/reminders.txt;
} | mail -a "Content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8" -s "Weekly reminders" user@localhost
This works pretty well already, but it would be nice to include which week the reminders are for in the subject. For this, we would like to find the dates of the first and last days of the week. Again, there is a handy command for working with dates which is simply called date. If run without arguments, it simply prints the current date and time. However, we can tell it to find a different date and we can also specify how to format it.
SUN=$(date --date='last Sunday' +'%B %d')
SAT=$(date --date='next Saturday' +'%B %d')
We have already seen how to store something in a variable and how to get the output of a command. The specifications for the dates are fairly obvious. The
+ indicates a string used to indicate the format we want the date in,
%B is the name of the month and
%d is the day of the month.
Now there is one catch with the dates here, if it is run on Saturday or Sunday, that date will be off (it will be last Sunday or next Saturday when what we really want is
this Sunday or Saturday). We can avoid this by checking if it is Saturday or Sunday and using the current date if it is:
if [[ $(date +'%a') == 'Sun' ]]; then
SUN=$(date +'%B %d')
else
SUN=$(date --date='last Sunday' +'%B %d')
fi
if [[ $(date +'%a') == 'Sat' ]]; then
SAT=$(date +'%B %d')
else
SAT=$(date --date='next Saturday' +'%B %d')
fi
Here, the
+'%a' requests the current date be formatted simply as the three letter abbreviation for the day of the week. So if today is Sunday, we use today's date for the Sunday on which our calendar begins, otherwise we use last Sunday. We do the same thing with Saturday.
Putting it all together we have:
#!/usr/bin/bash
if [[ $(date +'%a') == 'Sun' ]]; then
SUN=$(date +'%B %d')
else
SUN=$(date --date='last Sunday' +'%B %d')
fi
if [[ $(date +'%a') == 'Sat' ]]; then
SAT=$(date +'%B %d')
else
SAT=$(date --date='next Saturday' +'%B %d')
fi
{
echo "Here are your weekly reminders:";
remind -cu+ /path/to/reminders.txt;
} | mail -a "Content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8" -s "Reminders for the week of $SUN through $SAT" user@localhost
Since this script generates a weekly calendar of reminders (exercise for the interested reader: write a version that mails reminders monthly instead of weekly), we want to make it's crontab entry run the script weekly, each Sunday:
0 0 * * 7 /path/to/remindermail.sh
Checking local mail
Since I didn't get into configuring your system to send mail to the outside world, I will at least give you a quick look at how to check your local mail.
Mutt
You can check local mail from the command line with
Mutt. Basic usage is pretty simple, it will take you to a list of messages, you can move up and down the list with the arrow keys and read the highlighted message by pressing "Enter", pressing the letter "q" will return to the list of messages or exit the application. For more information, you can read the
manual.
Thunderbird
It's also fairly simple to configure
Thunderbird to check your local mail, so you can see your local mail right next to your regular email. Under "Edit", select "Account Settings...", in the Account Settings dialog pull down the "Account Actions" drop down menu and select "Add Other Account..." (yes, it's Other Account, not Mail Account), select "Unix Mailspool (Movemail)" and click "Next", make sure the email address is user@localhost (or the domain name assigned to your machine), continue clicking "Next" (the account name is arbitrary, use whatever you like), and then click "Finish". Thunderbird is now configured to check your local mail, but in order for this to work, your user must be in the mail group. If you aren't in it already, you can add yourself by running this command as root:
usermod -aG mail user
Note that if you do this, it moves your mail from your system mailbox, to Thunderbird's. So once you have checked the mail with Thunderbird, it is no longer available to Mutt. Thunderbird seems to ignore the setting to automatically check mail from a Unix mailspool, you must explicitly click "Get Mail".
Getting system mail
Another handy use for checking local mail is to get important messages about the system. Many system utilities will send mail (which is why many systems like Debian automatically have an
MTA installed and configured for local mail). This mail typically goes to root, so if your system isn't already configured to forward this mail to your account, you can do so by simply adding this line to the end of you
/etc/aliases:
root: user
Summary
reminderpopup.sh
#!/usr/bin/bash
export DISPLAY=$(w | grep "\s:[0-9]" | grep -m1 "^username\s" | awk '{print $3}')
MSG=$(remind /path/to/reminders.txt)
if [[ "$MSG" != "No reminders." ]]; then
kdialog --title "Today's Reminders" --msgbox "$MSG"
fi
remindermail.sh
#!/usr/bin/bash
if [[ $(date +'%a') == 'Sun' ]]; then
SUN=$(date +'%B %d')
else
SUN=$(date --date='last Sunday' +'%B %d')
fi
if [[ $(date +'%a') == 'Sat' ]]; then
SAT=$(date +'%B %d')
else
SAT=$(date --date='next Saturday' +'%B %d')
fi
{
echo "Here are your weekly reminders:";
remind -cu+ /path/to/reminders.txt;
} | mail -a "Content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8" -s "Reminders for the week of $SUN through $SAT" user@localhost
crontab
0 8 * * * /path/to/reminderpopup.sh
0 0 * * 7 /path/to/remindermail.sh
Notes
Bash versus generic sh
The scripts here are all written specifically for Bash, not portable shell scripting. All Unix-type systems have a shell,
/bin/sh, that conforms to certain standards. Generic, portable shell scripts will work with any of them, but the code I have written here use extra features that Bash offers and so these scripts will only work with Bash. You can do the same things with portable shell scripting. So, if you are trying to write portable shell scripts, you will want to
note the differences from what you have seen here.
Debian
I wrote and tested most of this on Debian. If you are using a different distribution, there may be some differences. I appreciate feedback if there is a significant difference affecting users of another distribution, etc.
Feedback
Questions, corrections, and feedback are welcome. You can comment on the post or email me directly. I'll try to answer any questions, but I can't guarantee a time frame.
Update, 2015-01-12:
The previous version of the popup script broke when updating to Debian 8.0 “Jessie” as the output of
w has changed. The following version works on the new version:
#!/bin/bash
export DISPLAY=$(w | grep -m1 "^blue\s\+:[0-9]" | awk '{print $2}')
MSG=$(remind -q -g /home/blue/Documents/FamilyBirthdays-remind.txt)
if [[ "$MSG" != "No reminders." ]]; then
kdialog --title "Today's Reminders" --msgbox "$MSG"
fi
