DIARY is a program for maintaining a record of your commitments. It is intended to be both a software equivalent of a hardcopy diary and an improvment upon it.
Note that all commands may be abreviated to the minimum necesary to be unambiguous, case is not significant. Commands may be specified as a parameter to the DIARY program or may be typed interactively if no parameter is given.
The following sections explain the use of the program.
The first kind is an OCCASIONAL event, like all traditional diary entries:
--------------------------------------------------
Friday 13th
Full Moon, Aboriginal festival of Haristocloc
Dinner with Bella Lugosi
--------------------------------------------------
These may be inserted into your diary with the ADD command, see section 2.
There is also a DAILY OCCASIONAL event. This is something like a conference or workshop that takes place every day for three days or similar. See the DAILY command for details.
The second class of entry is a REGULAR entry. These may be weekly, monthly or annual.
For example:
Weekly: Every Friday during term time VLSI Lecture at 10am. Monthly: Pay rates on 10th of every month. Annual: Wife's Birthday - don't forget.
These may be added to your diary with the REGULAR command, see section 2.
There are three commands for adding messages as outlined in section 1.
Expired entries are deleted the day after they were for.
If you want to abandon the entry type Ctrl-Z to the Subject: prompt.
If the specified range falls accross a weekend you are given the option of excluding the weekend days.
Expired entries are deleted the day after the finish date.
Typing Ctrl-Z to the Subject: prompt abandons the entry.
The first prompt is "W)eekly, M)onthly, A)nnual: ".
Type 'w' to add a weekly item and you will be prompted for a day of the week that the event takes place, this should be typed as a word, and may be abreviated.
Type 'm' to add a monthly event and you will be prompted for the day of the month. This should be given as a number.
Type 'a' to add an annual event and you will be prompted for a date. This may be entered as a standard date, see section 3.
Each will then prompt for a time, subject and text as for ADD.
Both Monthly and Weekly will then ask if the event is only during term time. DIARY knows about terms until 1988......
If the entry is to be between two particular dates then if you say 'N' to the term time only command then you can specify a start and stop date to be used. The item will be deleted from the diary after its time slot has expired.
TODAY - Lists todays events TOMORROW - Lists tomorrows events. WEEK - List events up to and including next Sunday MONTH - Lists all events to the end of the Month YEAR - Lists all events until the end of the Year
All these lists include the starts and finishes of the University Term automatically.
The last three commands may be preceeded by "Next " to list the events for that period.
Two other commands are available for more specific requests:
ON - This prompts for a date and then prints out events on that
date.
BETWEEN - This needs a From Date and a To Date and then prints out events
between those two dates, inclusive.
DIARY REMINDER
in the file then the first time you log in each day (and only the first time) you get a list of the days events. If it is a Monday then the following week is printed. Additionally, the first time you log in each month prints out a month, and the first time in a new year prints out the year ahead.
The format for giving dates is very flexible, with a large variety of forms.
The following numeric examples are indicative of the format:
20 - the twentieth of this month 20/4 - the twentieth of April 20 4 20/4/86 - the twentieth of April 1986 20 4 1986
Months may be given as words:
20 Jan - the twentieth of January 20-January-87 - the twentieth of January 1987
Or simply a day may be given:
Monday - next monday Next Tuesday - next tuesday Next and This are noise words This Tues Wed - next wednesday
Dates always mean the next, so if no year is given and the day and month are before the current date they then mean next year.
Today and Tomorrow are also valid dates.
Specifying times is also quite flexible.
12:00 - 12:00 12/00 12pm 12 Noon Midday Midnight - 24:00 10:40pm - 22:40 22 40 Breakfast - 07:30 Empire_Coffee - 10:30 Morning_Coffee - 11:00 Lunch - 12:30 Tiffin - 15:30 Afternoon_Coffee - 16:00 Tea - 18:00 Dinner - 19:30 (for 20:00)
The following extra commands are available:
The same effect can be acheived using Ctrl-Z.
To abort without modifying the diary file use Ctrl-Y.
To leave half way through type Ctrl-Z.
Deleted entries cannot be recovered except by aborting the run of DIARY.
The command
SEARCH <string>
will attempt to locate a diary entry containing <string>, starting from the first entry.
With no parameter the command searches for the same text as before, starting after the previously located entry.
Case is not significant in the search.
Two silly features are included:
MENU - This generates a random suggestion for what to cook for tea
tonight. This is a perennial problem in the Marshall household.
Please mail suggestions for more dishes to RMM at ECSVAX.
COOKIE - This prints out a Fortune Cookie message, using the UNIX fortune
file.
view:diary printed on 16/02/89 at 17.28