Friday, February 01, 2008

 

cal.exe under Cygwin

Upgrading Cygwin is never free of surprises, big or small. This time, following an upgrade, I noticed that decades-old utility "cal" (display a Gregorian calendar) suddenly disappeared.

Searching Cygwin-related sites took me a while, since quite obviously queries like "Cygwin cal" or "cygwin Gregorian calendar" bring up thousands of false positives.

Finally, I found a posting on Cygwin mailing list saying that for whatever reason cal.exe, along with some other utilities which used to be part of package "cygutils" (installed by default) now moved to (supposedly new) package "util-linux", so it has to be installed (I don't actually think it has any other useful utilities except "cal").

OK, one more problem solved... What is awaiting us at the next upgrade?

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# posted by Kostya @ 10:54 AM
Comments:
Thanks for the clue. I was looking for the cal utility on Cygwin and scratching my head about places to look. Good stuff. :)
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : 4:53 PM
 
Haaa ok good help thanks.
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : 8:39 PM
 
Thank you!
I think you just saved me several hours of searching.
# posted by Blogger CrankyMatt : 5:12 PM
 
I could not find any clues in pal config files or command line options to support the orginal cal functionality. It is ok to add new features like events etc, but backward compatibility is very essential for users to get used to. Is there a plan to fix pal(1) to support backward comaptilility to cal(1) command? For example, how can I print the whole year calendar like 'cal 2009' with pal?
# posted by Blogger Ramakrishna : 7:02 AM
 
Thanks for the pointer. Theoretically we can search using http://www.cygwin.com/packages/, but it errored out with a 500 when I searched for cal. Anybody know a general way to search for a specific cygwin utility or package?
# posted by Blogger DirtPupFC : 1:48 PM
 
Thanks for the pointer to the correct package. When I found out that cal was missing, I searched for it in Cygwin packages, hoping that it was an annoying but simple install away. But it found nothing.

Why on earth would they remove it from the default install? Are people really hurting that bad for disk space these days?
# posted by Blogger Unknown : 5:01 AM
 
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