BDAY

Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
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NAME

bday - birthday daemon

SYNOPSIS

bday [ -bbirthdays ] [ -mmessage ] [ -rreport_to ] [ -ssendmail_cmd ]

DESCRIPTION

Bday is a program intended to be run every day out of cron(1). It reads a file containing a list of user names and birthdays, and sends a message to anyone whose birthday is today. The ``-r'' option may be used to specify a person who should receive a report whenever a greeting is sent.

The ``-b'' option may be used to specify the file containing the list of people's birthdays; the default is /usr/adm/bdaylist. This file should consist of a series of lines of three fields, each separated by whitespace:

#emailname   month   day
rsalz        2       10

The first column is the name of the person to send the email message to. The second column is the month in which the person's birthday occurs; 1 is for January, and so on up to 12 for December. The third column is the day of the month on which their birthday occurs. Blank lines, and any text after a pound sign is ignored.

The ``-m'' option may be used to specify the file with the birthday message; the default is /usr/adm/bdaymesg. This is useful, for example, to send different greetings to people who's birthday falls on a weekend.

The command used to send the mail may be changed by giving the ``-s'' option; this is useful for debugging. Note that the details of sending the message (such as the mail headers) are compiled into the code, but that's okay because this is just a short fun hack, anyhow.

AUTHOR

Written by Rich $alz, <rsalz@bbn.com>, after receiving just such a message from one of the machine at MIT. This package has no copyright.

FILES

/usr/adm/bdaylist Default birthday list
/usr/adm/bdaymesg Default birthday message

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 21:54:34 GMT, February 02, 2023