Change HH:MM with your target time.

This is for a Debian/Ubuntu GNU system. You need bash (package bash), date (package coreutils) and toilet (package toilet). Install with:

# apt-get install bash coreutils toilet toilet-fonts

This ran on a ubuntu box using espeak for speaking text with the bash shell. On a mac you should use 'say'. Also you can change your alarm interval and your snooze interval which are currently 8 hours and 1 minute. I would run this via cron yet it's easier to disable if you run it as a command like this :P

You can also do this for seconds, minutes, hours, etc... Can't use dates before the epoch, though.

if you need to install cron jobs in a given time range.

date MMDDhhmmYYYY

date MMDDhhmm

# example 27.12.1975 08:00

date 122708001975

you will hear how many seconds since 1.1.1970 in english words with billions, millions and thousands.

this is very useful, if you want to get over to use the unixtimestamp instead of the 24 hour clock in your dayly life

Create a file with actual date as filename

More recent versions of the date command finally have the ability to decode the unix epoch time into a human readable date. This function makes it simple to utilize this feature quickly.

If you have used bash for any scripting, you've used the date command alot. It's perfect for using as a way to create filename's dynamically within aliases,functions, and commands like below.. This is actually an update to my first alias, since a few commenters (below) had good observations on what was wrong with my first command.

# creating a date-based ssh-key for askapache.github.com

# create a tar+gzip backup of the current directory

I personally find myself having to reference

quite a bit as a result. So this nice alias saves me a lot of time. This is one bdash mofo. Works in sh and bash (posix), but will likely need to be changed for other shells due to the parameter substitution going on.. Just extend the sed command, I prefer sed to pretty much everything anyways.. but it's always preferable to put in the extra effort to go for as much builtin use as you can. Otherwise it's not a top one-liner, it's a lazyboy recliner.

Here's the old version:

This trick from my [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html bash_profile ]

Several people have submitted commands to do this, but I think this is the simplest solution. It also happens to be the most portable one: It should work with any sh or csh derived shell under any UNIX-like OS.

Oh by the way, with my German locale ($LC_TIME set appropriately) it prints "g" most of the time, and sometimes (on Wednesdays) it prints "h". It never prints "y".

A command to find out what the day ends in. Can be edited slightly to find out what "any" output ends in.

NB: I haven't tested with weird and wonderful output.

The shell has perfectly adequate pattern matching for simple expressions.

(Useful when firewalls prevent you from using NTP.)

This produces a parseable output of the last day of the month in future or past. Change the '-v-0m' to be a month plus or minus from the current system time.

If you don't have netcat, you can use curl.

Good when firewalled and only in need of a reasonable accurate time.

Use a fast responding web server.

That works in all softs, CLI or GUI... I don't want to waste time to all the time typing the same stuff . So, I have that command in my window manager shortcuts ( meta+l ). All the window managers have editable shortcuts AFAIK. If not, or you don't want to use it that way, you can easily use the xbindkeys soft.

I you're using kde4, you can run :

then open "inputs actions" and create a new shortcut.

For Gnome take a look there : http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-create-keyboard-shortcuts-in-gnome/

A more advanced one, with strings and newlines :

For complicated or long paste, you can feed xvkbd with a file :

You can simulate ^C ( control+c ) too or others combinations of keys :

There's no man page nor help ( On my Archlinux distro ), but you can see online doc there : http://homepage3.nifty.com/tsato/xvkbd/

Not perl but shorter.