Highlight the current date in cal

Question

I would like to highlight today's date in the output of the cal command. What is the best way?

This is what I have so far:

cal -m | grep -C6 --color "$(date +%e)"

but it doesn't work for all cases e.g, when the date has a single digit. I also want the highlighting to work when I display the calendar for a year.

what specific version of UNIX are you using and what is the output of echo $TERM ? — jamespo, Apr 11 '11 at 14:09
What version of Red Hat and cal, e.g. `cat /etc/redhat-release` and `rpm -q util-linux`. This works out of the box on recent versions of Ubuntu and Fedora, so presumably you are using an old version. — Mikel, Apr 12 '11 at 02:57
@Mikel Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3 (Taroon Update 7) and util-linux-2.11y-31.11 — dogbane, Apr 12 '11 at 08:12
nope, as I don't have root access. I didn't think that searching for a date and surrounding it with a colour escape sequence would be that difficult. Surely grep or sed can do the job? — dogbane, Apr 12 '11 at 09:55

score 12 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 17 '15 at 01:40

12

I don't know how to highlight the day in the year calendar cal -y with just regular expressions, but the reason your example was not working for single digit dates is because $(date +%e) prepends a space to the output when the date has a single digit.

This will work:

cal | grep --color -EC6 "\b$(date +%e | sed "s/ //g")"

answered Feb 17 '15 at 01:40

Jorge Bucaran

437
4
13

2

in __fish__: `cal | grep --color -EC6 "\b"(date +%e | sed "s/ //g")` – Jorge Bucaran Feb 17 '15 at 01:42
1

The command should be `cal | grep --color -EC6 "\b$(date +%e | sed 's/ //g')\b"` instead, otherwise, if the day of month is 1 or 2 there will be multiple 1x and 2x days get highlighted. – xpt Sep 13 '21 at 20:16

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 21 '21 at 14:06

4

ncal -b scratched this itch for me.

answered Oct 21 '21 at 14:06

Mike Salvatore

41
1

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 11 '11 at 13:36

3

On my system (openSUSE 11.4, util-linux-2.19), the current date in output form cal is automatically highlighted (reverse colors) if the output goes to terminal. As per the manpage, this seems to be the default. If it does not work on your system, it might be a bug.

answered Apr 11 '11 at 13:36

Petr Uzel

7,157
4
30
26

There are many variants of `cal`, for example all three BSDs have different features. This isn't a bug in dogbane's cal, just a different implementation. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Apr 11 '11 at 19:59

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 27 '14 at 14:34

3

The output is already highlighted, so you don't need to highlight it manually. In case you want it to work with grep, you need to disable it:

cal -mh | grep -C6 --color "$(date +%e)"

answered Apr 27 '14 at 14:34

Braiam

35,380
25
108
167

`cal | grep -C6 --color "\b$(date +%e)\b"` ... need the boundary `\b` otherwise it will highlight chunks of the year too – slf Oct 14 '14 at 13:21

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 11 '11 at 15:19

1

It may be fairly complicated to do something like this;
Why not try something like pal?

answered Apr 11 '11 at 15:19

Chris2048

601
2
6
11

score 0 · Answer 6 · edited Feb 17 '15 at 04:20

0

I think you can use the command date +%-e instead of date +%e to remove the space.

edited Feb 17 '15 at 04:20

Celada

43,173
5
96
105

answered Feb 17 '15 at 03:33

user103406

11

maximusin9 · Answer 7 · 2018-07-09T19:33:13.980

For BSD systems without grep --color option:

B=$(tput bold)
U=$(tput sgr0)
DAY=$(date +%e | tr -d " ")
cal | sed -E -e "s|(.*[^0-9])($DAY)([^0-9].*)|\1$B\2$U\3|"

Oneliner:

cal | sed -E -e "s|(.*[^0-9])($(date +%e | tr -d " "))([^0-9].*)|\1$(tput bold)\2$(tput sgr0)\3|"

With week numbers left side:

cal -m -w | sed -E -e "s|(.*) ([[ 0-9]+])$|\2 \1|" -e "1,2s|^|     |" -e "s|(.*[^0-9])($(date +%e | tr -d " "))([^0-9].*)|\1$(tput bold)\2$(tput sgr0)\3|"

Highlight the current date in cal

7 Answers7

Linked