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@dircategory GNU packages @direntry * Gcal: (gcal). The GNU calendar program. * tcal: (gcal)Invoking tcal. Run Gcal with tomorrow's date. * txt2gcal: (gcal)Invoking txt2gcal. Convert text file to resource file. * gcal2txt: (gcal)Invoking gcal2txt. Convert resource file to text file.
Copyright (C) 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 Thomas Esken
Any suggestions, improvements, extensions, bug reports, donations, proposals for contract work, and so forth are welcome! Please send them directly to my eMail address. If you like my work, I'd appreciate a postcard from you!
------------------------oOO \\\_"/ OOo--------------------------- Thomas Esken O (/o-o\) O eMail: esken@uni-muenster.de Im Hagenfeld 84 (( ^ )) Phone: +49 251 232585 D-48147 Muenster; Germany \____) ~ (____/ MotD : 2old2live, 2young2die
This is Edition 2.40 of Gcal, an Extended Calendar Program,
for the 2.40 (or later) version of the GNU implementation
of cal and calendar.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Free Software Foundation.
Apart from the usual and well known calendar functions like the output of a month or a year calendar sheet, or the output of an eternal holiday list, Gcal offers the facility to display fixed dates on the day of their occurrence and to remind or inform the user about them. So it's imaginable after booting the computer or starting the work session, that the user is informed on screen or by means of electronic mail, about all holidays or appointments which are observed or scheduled for that day.
The period, for which Gcal respects occurring fixed dates, may be freely selected by the user. So it is possible that Gcal displays all fixed dates which occur on tomorrow's date, the whole week, the whole month or in the whole year. Fixed dates which occur on a selected date of the year and those that occur relative to another given date, are displayed either related to this single date only, or in listed manner starting at this date and ending at the actual date (1).
There are two ways to display a preview of fixed dates (2) or retrospective view of fixed dates (3). On the one hand, Gcal can be started using an option that sets the system date of the computer to the given date during the time of the program execution with the result, the program assumes the system date is set to this given date and the user can define any needed period that should be respected, by an option. On the other hand, Gcal can be started with a command which forces the program to use a different year instead of the actual year, so Gcal will display all occurring fixed dates for this particular year. But this limits the user in that it disables defining any needed period by an option, because the period is always set to the whole year by default.
Gcal isn't only able to display fixed dates which are stored for a concrete date, e.g. `Fixed date on 1st December 1995', rather than fixed dates occurring periodically again and again. So it's possible to define repeated events like `This fixed date occurs all days in May 1995' or `Every 15th November in any years'. These fixed date definitions are stored in resource files and whenever Gcal is started, an option to evaluate the necessary resource files can be given.
Once the user has set his/her preferred command line arguments for querying the fixed dates data base, it is possible to store them in a response file or shell script file. A response file contains all arguments delivered to Gcal, but unlike a shell script file, such a response file isn't executable; it is only a pool of command line arguments which can be preloaded if needed. A shell script file can be started and calls Gcal directly with all arguments stored in it, and all arguments which are given further in the command line.
A list of all usable command line arguments and their descriptions can be found in the next chapter, which helps one use Gcal in the most efficient and productive way possible.
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