Terminal Tips: What Day of the Year Is It?
This is a rather silly tip to impress (or freak out) your friends by making them think you are mildly autistic /
weird. Simply launch the Terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities/) and type cal -j and hit
return. This will display a calendar of the current month listing the julian dates (days numbered in sequence from
January 1st). Today, for example, is the 85th day of the year. Now plotting which day in the julian calendar
corresponds to which regular date can be difficult (if you didn’t know that today was the last Saturday in March, for
example), so simply type cal and return in the Terminal to list a regular calendar.
You can also type cal -y to list a calendar for the entire year and cal -jy to list
the julian calendar for the entire year, so you can pull out odd facts, such as “April Fools Day is the 91st day of
this year; it varies on leap years.”

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Cap'n Hector said 4:46PM on 7-05-2005
Or try a shell script I wrote that helps me keep a calendar on my desktop that indicates the current day. Geektool runs the script to keep it on the desktop, and here's the script:
#!/bin/sh
#
# cald - if user doesn't give an argument, put [ ] around today's
# date on this month's calendar
case $# in
0) set x `date` # Get the current day of the month into $4
/usr/bin/cal |
# Put > < around $4 (shell expands $4 inside the doublequotes)
sed -e 's/^/ /' -e "s/ $4$/[$4]/" -e "s/ $4 /[$4]/"
;;
# If arguments are given, just run the normal cal
*) /usr/bin/cal "$@" ;;
esac
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Mark H said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
This one is my favorite: 'cal 9 1752'.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar for the history behind it.
Reply
PoppaGeek said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
Being mildly autistic does not make you "weird".
And it is "display" not desplay.
Reply