A few weeks ago I blogged about the potential to live your life at the command-prompt. Forget about graphical niceties; it’s just you, a dollar prompt and a blank screen.

If you’ve decided to make the switch then you might be interested in cal and ncal.

To quote the man page, these two utilities “display a calendar and the date of Easter”. I’m not sure why the fascination with Easter, or even why there’s a Christian bias, but cal is a utility I use on a regular basis to help me schedule.

The difference between ncal and cal is primarily down to formatting. With ncal the axis are reversed. Here’s a month view from ncal:

... and here’s the same thing via cal:

Using cal and ncal is a piece of cake. Simply specify a month and/or a year to get a monthly calendar. For example, to find out what day my sister’s birthday falls on in the year 2041, I can type:

cal june 2041

To find what her birthday would be had she been a contemporary of Jesus, I can type:

cal june 1

This will show be the days in the month of June in 1AD. There are certain caveats about Gregorian/Julian calendar change-over dates that you might need to take into account if you seriously want to know the dates back in time—see the man page for details.

For a whole year’s calendar, just specify the year:

cal 2007

To view the previous month, the current month and the following month, use the -3 command option:

cal -3