Historical dates via mail

The most convenient way to be reminded of historical dates that happened today or tomorrow some years ago, is to get this information sent via mail daily. This, by the way, was the reason I started with this small project.

To achieve this you could hack up your own small script that sends the mail. Alternatively you could use the script mail-calendar which I personally use and which is maintained through CVS as well.

In order to be periodically reminded on what's going on you can start the script from above via cron. To do that, mark the file executable and add the following line to your crontab, assuming that the script is located in ~/bin/. This will inform you three minutes after midnight about historical dates on that day.

   3 0 * * *       ~/bin/mail-calendar -l de_DE

Important note: this program requires the FreeBSD version of calendar. The OpenBSD version uses incompatible commandline options and doesn't provide features used by this program. An older version of the bsdmainutils package which provides the calendar program is secured here.