PLAN(1)PLAN(1)NAMEplan - interactive X/Motif calendar and day planner
pland - daemon for plan
notifier - X/Motif text displayer for
SYNOPSISplan [options]
plan [mmdd]hhmm [options] [message]*
pland [-d] -[kK] -[lL]
notifier [-hdv123] [-ttitle] [-ssubtitle] [-iicontitle] [file]
DESCRIPTIONplan is a schedule planner based on X/Motif. It displays a month calen‐
dar similar to xcal, but every day box is large enough to show appoint‐
ments in small print. By pressing on a day box, the appointments for
that day can be listed and edited. This manual page describes the com‐
mand line options of plan. For information on how to use plan, refer
to the on-line help pages.
plan has three modes: GUI, which starts up with a window in interactive
mode, append, which adds an appointment from the command line without
windows, and batch, which prints miscellaneous information without win‐
dows. Batch mode is mainly useful for external scripts (CGI and other‐
wise) that process appointment data.
pland is a daemon that watches for appointment triggers. The daemon is
normally started from your .sgisession or .xsession file. It puts
itself in the background. If plan is started, it checks for the exis‐
tence of the daemon, and offers to start one if it can't find it.
notifier displays the standard input in a window, with appropriate
titles and background colors. The only program that ever uses it is the
daemon; it is a separate program only to keep the daemon small.
OPTIONS OF PLAN, GUI MODE
-s Standalone, don't offer to start daemon if none exists. Without
daemon, no appointment alarms and warnings will trigger. If a
daemon happens to exist, it is notified when the database
changes, but no warning is printed if it doesn't.
-S When plan starts up, silently start the daemon if it does not
exist.
-f Don't fork on startup. This is useful for debugging.
-k If there appears to be another plan running, start up anyway.
This is useful if a /tmp/.plan<uid> file got accidentally left
behind, and plan fails to check whether the older plan still
exists. This option is largely obsolete in version 1.2.
OPTIONS OF PLAN, APPEND MODE
[mmdd]hhmm
Add an appointment at mm/dd hh:mm (month/day hours:minutes). If
mmdd is not specified, today's date is used. No menus will start
up. No option may be specified. Instead of the mmddhhmm nota‐
tion, a date and time may be specified, such as '24.12. 12:34'.
-u U add appointment to user file U instead of your own appointment
file.
-l T Set the length of the new appointment to N, in the form
hours:minutes.
-n T Set new appointment will have no time associated with it. This
overrides the time set with the [mmdd]hhmm option, which must be
specified anyway.
-r N The new appointment repeats every N days. N is an integer
greater than zero.
-d N The new appointment repeats on day N of the month. N is an inte‐
ger between 1 and 31. There can be multiple -d options.
-D N The new appointment repeats on weekday N. N=0 indicates Sunday,
1 is Monday, 2 is Tuesday, 3 is Wednesday, 4 is Thursday, 5 is
Friday, and 6 is Saturday. There can be multiple -D options.
-O N The -D days only repeat the Nth time of the month. May be
repeated. For example, "-D 2 -O 2 -O 4" means the 2nd and 4th
Tuesdays of each month. -O 6 means the last one.
-e D The new appointment stops repeating on date D. D is a string
such as
-w N Set the early warning time of the new appointment to N minutes.
-W N Set the late warning time of the new appointment to N minutes.
[message]*
The note message associated with the new appointment. It should
be quoted if it contains shell metacharacters.
OPTIONS OF PLAN, BATCH MODE
-h List available options.
-d Print fallback X resources and exit. The output can be appended
directly to the ~/.Xdefaults file for modification of the geome‐
try, color, and font defaults.
-v Print the program version and patchlevel and exit.
-W [S] Indicates that plan is not called by a user but by the web
front-end. In this case, there are no ``own'' appointments
because the CGI script that executes plan is probably run by the
pseudo-user ``nobody'' or ``httpd''. A dummy user ``webplan'' is
substituted instead, whose home directory is assumed to be /tmp.
All database files from netplan server S will be read. If S is
omitted, ``localhost'' is assumed. This mode is possible only if
there is a netplan server running on S (or localhost). This
option is also available with -t mode and in non-interactive
mode; in this case it determines which files can be listed with
-o -t, and which files can be edited.
-F Print a list of all appointment files found on a given netplan
server. By default the server on the local host is queried,
unless a -W option specifies another server host.
-H Y Print all holidays in the year Y (1970..2037) to stdout and
exit. This is used by the web front-end.
-o If used with -t or -T, also prints appointments of all users
configured with the Config->Users popup.
-u L If used with -t or -T, prints appointments of all users named in
the comma-separated list L. The -o and -u options are mutually
exclusive.
-t [D [n]]
Print a list of today's appointments to stdout. Don't start up
interactive windows. The exit status is 0 if there are appoint‐
ments on the specified date, and 1 otherwise. If a date D is
specified, print appointments on that date. All standard date
specifiers work:
-t +3 Print appointments in three days
-t -1 Print yesterday's appointments
-t tomorrow Print appointments for tomorrow
-t thursday Print appointments for Thursday
-t 25.12. Print appointments for Christmas, if 24-hour mode
is selected
-t 12/25 Print appointments for Christmas, if 12-hour mode
is selected. 12/24 hour mode is selected with the
Config pulldown in the main window.
If a second argument n is given, n days are printed beginning
with day D. The default is 1. For example, "plan -t today 7"
prints one week.
-T [D [n]]
Same as -t, but print the end time instead of the length (hi
Vera).
-i If used with the -t or -T options, print the data in a form that
is easy to parse for other programs. This is used by the web
front-end.
-W [S] switch to web front-end mode and read the files from the netplan
server on host S, or localhost if S is omitted. These files can
then be chosen from with -u. See above for details.
OPTIONS OF PLAND
-d Debug mode. Runs pland in the foreground without forking, and
prints debugging information. Recommended if pland seems to die
unexpectedly. (The most common cause of disappearing pland's is
a nonfunctional utmp; if -d is used pland recommends to recom‐
pile with the -DRABBITS option.) This option must precede the
other options.
-l Periodically check the system utmp to see if the user is still
logged in. If not, exit. This is the default on SGI, Sun, and
other SYSV systems.
-L (capital L) Do not check utmp. Use this option if pland dies
frequently, and running pland with the -d options reports
``logout, exiting'' for no apparent reason. On many systems utmp
is not reliable, and some programs like xterm so not create utmp
records unless configured properly. Use -L on such systems.
-k If another daemon exists, kill it and restart.
-K (capital K) If another daemon exists, kill it and exit.
OPTIONS OF NOTIFIER
-h List available options.
-d Print fallback X resources and exit. The output can be appended
directly to the ~/.Xdefaults file for modification of the geome‐
try, color, and font defaults.
-v Print the program version and patchlevel and exit.
-1 Set the window background color to green (early warning).
-2 Set the window background color to yellow (late warning).
-3 Set the window background color to red (alarm). This is the
default.
-ttitle
Set the title string above the message text (which is read from
stdin).
-ssubtitle
Set the subtitle string below the main title, in a small font.
-iicontitle
Set the icon title string that is printed below the mwm/4Dwm
icon.
In addition to these options, plan and notifier support the usual X
options -iconic and -geometry.
FILES
Below, DIR and LIB refer to the installation directories specified at
the beginning of the Makefile when the programs were compiled. By
defauly, they are /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib, or /usr/free‐
ware/bin and /usr/freeware/lib on SGI, or /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, and
/usr/lib/plan on Debian Linux, respectively. These are the directories
where plan and pland first search for executables and plan.help (LIB
first, then DIR). Next, $PLAN_PATH and $PATH are searched, and finally,
a built-in search path that also contains "." as its last item.
~/.dayplan
Database with all public entries and configuration options of
plan. See plan(4) for details.
~/.dayplan.priv
Database with all private entries.
~/.holiday
Definition of holidays. See the help text for the "Define Holi‐
day" popup menu that can be installed with the Holiday pulldown.
/tmp/.planUID
Lockfile that contains the PID of plan. Used to prevent multi‐
ple plan instances, and to send HUP signals to if a non-interac‐
tive plan invocation changed the database. UID is the user's
numerical user ID.
/tmp/.plandUID
Lockfile that contains the PID of the pland daemon. Used to pre‐
vent multiple daemons, and to send HUP signals to if the data‐
base changed for any reason. UID is the user's numerical user
ID.
DIR/plan
The plan program.
LIB/pland
The pland daemon. It must be in the DIR or LIB directory, or in
one of the directories in one of the search paths.
LIB/notifier
The notifier program. It must be in the DIR or LIB directory, or
in one of the directories in one of the search paths.
LIB/plan.help
The online help texts used by plan. It must be in the DIR or
LIB directory, or in one of the directories in one of the search
paths.
LIB/plan.help.X
This help file replaces plan.help if the language is set to X in
the Config Languages pulldown menu.
LIB/holiday
Definition of system standard holidays. They are read before
~/.holiday, and can be overridden in ~/.holiday. They must be
edited manually with a text editor.
LIB/plan_cal.ps
A PostScript skeleton file required for month and year calendar
printouts.
LIB/plan.lang.english
The standard message file. All messages used in plan must be
listed here in ASCII order. If this file is missing, only Eng‐
lish messages are supported.
LIB/plan.lang.X
The message file for language X. At startup, plan scans the LIB
directory and puts every file X it finds into the Config Lan‐
guage pulldown menu. A message is translated by first looking it
up in the plan_cal_english file. If the message is found in line
n, it is translated by using line n of plan.lang.X instead if X
was selected with the Language pulldown. See the Languages item
in the online help menu for instructions for creating new lan‐
guage files.
Note that previous versions put all executables into the DIR directory.
Beginning with 1.4.7, all executables except plan are in LIB. To avoid
finding obsolete executables first, LIB is searched befor DIR. Note
that, though netplan(8) supports primitive access control (which
requires editing a access list text file on the server host), no sup‐
port for access control is provided by the plan front-end in this ver‐
sion. Refer to netplan(8) for details.
SEE ALSO
plan(4), netplan(8)
AUTHOR
Thomas Driemeyer <thomas@bitrot.de>
Please send all complaints, comments, bug fixes, and porting experi‐
ences to me. Always include your plan version as reported by "plan -v"
in your mail. To be added to the mailing list, send mail to major‐
domo@bitrot.de with the line "subscribe plan" (without the quotes) in
the message body (not the subject).
See http://www.bitrot.de/plan.html for new releases.
PLAN(1)
