Filed under: How-tos, Terminal Tips
Terminal tip: Remind yourself about appointments
Got a place you need to be at 3:00? Want to send yourself a message to get out the door at 2:40? Terminal's "leave" command offers a simple way to remind yourself about your upcoming schedule. leave 0240 waits until 2:35 and then alerts you to get ready to leave with both text and a beep. Reminders occur at 5 minutes and 1 minutes before the time you enter, and then every minute after until you close the terminal window. (You can also kill the process whose id is listed for you when you issue the leave command.)
Leave uses a 12-hour clock so you don't have to worry about whether to use 0240 or 1440. Both produce the same result. All times are assumed to be within the next 12 hours.
You can also use the "+" flag to set a relative time. Say you want to work on a project for just the next hour. Use leave +0100. This sets an alarm for one hour from the current time.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Ahmad said 6:07PM on 5-24-2007
now that's a handy tip
Reply
Stephen Macklin said 8:05PM on 5-24-2007
Cool - that will come in handy all those times when iCal is just too complicated.
Reply
walkerjs said 8:45PM on 5-24-2007
Anyone gonna gripe about yet another Terminal.app tip like the last one? ;)
leave is pretty old, too. I remember now (that I've seen this post) that I used to use it all the time back in the late '80s on our Sun work stations. It's so old, that I forgot that I used to use it.
Still a good tip though!
Reply
Albright said 3:23AM on 5-25-2007
Note that this only works if you don't close the terminal window you started the process in. If you do that, the alarm will not trigger. I imagine switching users (su) would "break" this feature as well.
Reply
Sovok said 11:57AM on 5-25-2007
You can use Quicksilver for alarms, too.
Invoke Quicksilver, type ., type your message, tab, QSLargeTypeAction (if you press return now, it displays the message), ctrl+return, "run after delay" or "run at time", tab, enter your time (e.g. "5 minutes" or "17:56"), return and a big text bubble pops up with your text.
Reply
Paul Tran said 4:01AM on 5-26-2007
Yea that was very cool but you were 12 hours late. I had to give a presentation and I needed a way to set a small alarm to warn me when I should be finishing up.
Reply