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 calendar similar to xcal, but every day box is large
enough to show appointments in small print. By pressing on
a day box, the appointments for that day can be listed and
edited. This manual page describes the command 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 windows. 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 existence 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 debug-
ging.
-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 notation, 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 integer between 1 and 31. There can be mul-
tiple -d options.
-D N The new appointment repeats on weekday N. N=0 indi-
cates 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 appoint-
ment. 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 geometry, 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, ``local-
host'' is assumed. This mode is possible only if
there is a netplan server running on S (or local-
host). This option is also available with -t mode
and in non-interactive mode; in this case it deter-
mines 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 appointments 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 pull-
down in the main window.
If a second argument n is given, n days are printed
beginning with day D. The default is 1. For exam-
ple, "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. Recom-
mended if pland seems to die unexpectedly. (The
most common cause of disappearing pland's is a non-
functional utmp; if -d is used pland recommends to
recompile 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 reli-
able, 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 geometry, 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/freeware/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 executa-
bles 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 Holiday" popup menu that can be installed
with the Holiday pulldown.
/tmp/.planUID
Lockfile that contains the PID of plan. Used to
prevent multiple plan instances, and to send HUP
signals to if a non-interactive 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 prevent multiple daemons, and to send HUP
signals to if the database 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 directo-
ries 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 English messages are sup-
ported.
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 Language 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 Lan-
guage pulldown. See the Languages item in the
online help menu for instructions for creating new
language 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 executa-
bles 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 support for access control is provided by the
plan front-end in this version. 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 port-
ing experiences 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 majordomo@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)
