You heard me: `leave`!

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Normally, I'd foist this off into a sidebar link, but this discovery deserves a little more: it’s that brilliant.

I was reading UNIX productivity tips, and ran across the single greatest time-management command I've seen. Running leave asks “When do you have to leave?” You enter a time in HHMM format, and leave then pings you 5 minutes before, reminding you that you wanted to leave. Then it pings you the minute before. Then it pings you every minute until you either log out, or kill the leave process. This is brilliant stuff!

$ leave
When do you have to leave? 1830
Alarm set for Fri Aug  4 18:30. (pid 1735)
$ date +"Time now: %l:%M%p"
Time now: 6:24PM
<one minute passes>
$
<system bell rings>
You have to leave in 5 minutes.

The best part? It’s built into OS X. Thank God for BSD, eh? :) The productivity tips article is worth reading anyway, if only for gems like sorting your command-line history by command, by popularity:

$ history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -r
    103 svn
    100 cd
     75 ls
     52 exit
    ...
      1 cp
      1 chmod
      1 ack
$

Neat, eh?

This entry was published on Saturday, September 23, 2006. Articles published around the same time can be found in the archive.

Further reading: If you enjoyed this post, you might like to take a look at some of my other posts about ‘HOWTO’. I've also made available a list of all the topics I've written about if you're interested in my (folkless) folksonomy.