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birthdays

NAME

birthdays - birthday notifier

SYNOPSIS

birthdays [ -n ] mailing-list ...

DESCRIPTION

birthdays scans through the GNU Finger user database examining the Birth Date field and sends a Happy Birthday message to those users who are having one. (Users having an Unhappy Birthday are not mailed to.)

If optional arguments mailing-list exist, then each one is mailed a notification message explaining whose birthday it is. This is most useful if mailing-list is really a mailing list, so that a reasonable number of people can be notified of their co-workers birthdays.

If birthdays is passed the -n switch, then no mailing is done; rather, the list of people who are having a birthday is printed to the stdout.

Birthdays is best run from within a crontab; it only should run once a day. Here is an example crontab entry:

0 4 * * * root /usr/local/bin/birthdays bday-list@random.cs.edu

AUTHOR

The GNU version of birthdays was written by Brian Fox, inspired by a similar program at the MIT AI Lab.

SEE ALSO

makeusers(1), edituser(1), mkpasswd(1)