40.11 Send Yourself Reminder Mail

I use the at command (40.7) to send myself reminders. The at job runs a mail program (1.33) and feeds the body of the message to the mailer's standard input. Examples:

1. To send a one-line reminder, I use a one-line command like this:

   % at 0427 tuesday
   at> echo "send summary to Tim today" | mail [email protected]
   at> [CTRL-d]
   %

   It sends mail at (in this case) 4:27 a.m. on the next Tuesday. The mail says: "send summary to Tim today."

2. To send more than one line, you can use a temporary file:

   % vi msgfile
      ...put message body in msgfile...
   % at 0808 feb 28
   at> mail [email protected] < msgfile
   at> rm msgfile
   at> [CTRL-d]
   %

3. Combine the output of UNIX commands and text with backquotes (9.16) and a here document (8.18):

   % at 0115
   at> mail -s "Hard-working people" tom << END
   at> These employees are working late. They deserve a bonus:
   at> `w`
   at> END
   at> [CTRL-d]
   %

   That sends a message to tom at 1:15 a.m. tonight. (This mailer accepts a subject on the command line with its -s option. The output of the w command gives detailed information about logged-in users; not all systems have it.) Unless you understand how to quote here-document text (45.26), the message shouldn't have anything but letters, numbers, commas, and periods.

If your system administrator has set up the calendar (48.4) program, it's good for easy one-line reminders on particular days. If your UNIX has personal crontabs (40.12) that can send periodic reminders every Tuesday, every hour, or whatever: use the commands in items 1 or 2 above.