cal(1)

NAME
cal - display a calendar

SYNOPSIS

cal [ [month] year]

DESCRIPTION

The cal utility writes a Julian or Gregorian calendar to standard output. If the year operand is specified, a calendar for that year is written. If no operands are specified, a calendar for the current month is written.

The date to switch from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar is controlled by the environment variable GREGORIAN and the current locale.

OPERANDS

The following operands are supported:

month
    Specify the month to be displayed, represented as a decimal integer from 1 (January) to 12 (December). The default is the current month.

year
    Specify the year for which the calendar is displayed, represented as a decimal integer from 1 to 9999. The default is the current year.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of cal: LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LC_TIME, LC_MESSAGES, and NLSPATH.

TZ  Determine the timezone used to calculate the value of the current month.

GREGORIAN
    Unless LC_ALL or LC_TIME have been set to C, the environment GREGORIAN allows to specify a switch date to change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. The argument must be in the form:

    yyyy/mm/dd

    or

    yyyy-mm-dd

    and holds the day of the switch based on the Julian calendar. For the catholic parts of the Holy Roman Empire, this would be 1582/10/05 as October 5th was replaced by October 15th in 1582. For Prussia (Berlin), this would be 1612/08/23 as August 23th was replaced by September 2th in 1612.

    If GREGORIAN was not set or when in the C locale, the switch to the Gregorian calendar appears as if GREGORIAN was set to 1752/9/3. This is to make cal(1) compatible to the historic UNIX definition.

    A leading + sign in GREGORIAN allows to enforce the switch date even when in the C locale.

EXIT STATUS

The following exit values are returned:

0   Successful completion.

>0  An error occurred.

ATTRIBUTES

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

SEE ALSO

calendar(1), attributes(5), environ(5), standards(5)

NOTES

In case that the environment GREGORIAN is not active, an unusual calendar is printed for September 1752. That is the month 11 days were skipped in the Kingdom of Great Britain and their colonies to make up for lack of leap year adjustments. To see this calendar, type:

cal 9 1752

The command cal 83 refers to the year 83, not 1983.

The year is always considered to start in January.