Fun with Terminal

Stamp: 19 September 2008 | 3 Comments | Back to Previous Page

Birth Token

cat /usr/share/misc/birthtoken | grep [month]

This Terminal command line will show you what is the birth flower and birth stone for the given birth month, instantly.

$cat /usr/share/misc/birthtoken | grep Jan
January:Garnet:Carnation

Meaning of Flowers

cat /usr/share/misc/flowers | grep -i [flower-name]

Do you know that Camelia means reflected loveliness? Terminal knows it.

$cat /usr/share/misc/flowers | grep -i Clover
Clover:Be mine.

Milestones in Music

cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.music | grep [month/date]

Show you the date of birth of milestones in music related to the given month and date parameter.

$cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.music | grep 01/10
01/10	Blues guitarist Howlin' Wolf dies in Chicago, 1976
01/10	Jim Croce is born in Philadelphia, 1943
01/10	Pat Benatar is born in Long Island, 1952
01/10	Rod Stewart is born in Glasgow, Scotland, 1945

Proper Names

cat /usr/share/dict/propernames | grep [portion-of-name]

This command line, if executed, will return you completed names from the give portion of name. Whether it's proper or not, I doubt.

$cat /usr/share/dict/propernames | grep Te
Ted
Teresa
Teri
Teriann
Terrance
Terrence
Terri
Terry
Teruyuki

Birthdays

cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.birthday | grep [month/date]
cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.birthday | grep [name]

This particular Terminal command line will show you the birthdays of some famous people. Not so breaking though, I can't even find Steve Jobs and Bill Gates birthdays inside.

$cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.birthday | grep 09/16
09/16	Allen Funt born in Brooklyn, NY, 1914

$cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.birthday | grep Steve
07/25	Steve Goodman is born in Chicago, 1948
11/13	Robert Louis Stevenson born, 1850

Extra

Thanks to reader James Hindle for pointing out that we can see today's music, history, computer and birthday everytime we open up our Terminal, here is how to do it:

Open Terminal and type vim ~/.bash_profile
Press character i to go to Insert Mode

Insert the Terminal commands

today=`date "+%m/%d"`
grep $today /usr/share/calendar/calendar.music
grep $today /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history
grep $today /usr/share/calendar/calendar.computer
grep $today /usr/share/calendar/calendar.birthday

Quit Insert Mode by pressing Escape key
Type :wq to save the changes to the file and exit vim mode
Relaunch your Terminal and now you should be able to see the changes

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3 Comments

James Hindle

If you put the following in ~/bash_profile, every time you open a terminal window it will print today's birthdays, and world, music and computer history milestones: today=`date "+%m/%d"` grep $today /usr/share/calendar/calendar.music grep $today /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history grep $today /usr/share/calendar/calendar.computer grep $today /usr/share/calendar/calendar.birthday

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Wendy

Thanks for that James. I will plug it to the article.

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Jeff Jolley

There is a command-line program to get the calendar stuff out: /usr/bin/calendar. Normally, you do "calendar -f {calendar-file}", so:

calendar -f calendar.music

will give you the music calendar. It will also automatically do stuff like, if today is Friday, it will show you Saturday and Sunday's calendar events so you won't miss them over the weekend when you're not at work. It's very cool. You can customize how you want your calendars to work by copying the calendars from the /usr/share/calendar directory to the ~/.calendar director. (You will have to create that directory, of course). "man calendar" for more information.

I find it easiest to combine calendars (music/usholidays/birthdays) into one calendar in my home directory and adding a custom calendar directive into my .profile. View /usr/share/calendar/calendar.all to see how to combine calendars.

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