How often have you wanted to take a quick glance of the calendar in your desktop? You may need to click a couple of dozen of times on your desktop if the period your are interested in is more than a decade back.

If you are a command line geek who prefer tools that are fast and lean, you can use the cal command to display the calendar instead. The cal command is available in most UNIX/Linux distributions and is also available under Cygwin - The Linux-like environment for Windows.

To print the previous, current and next month:

ibrahim@anfield:~$ cal -3

To print the calendar for the year 2008:

ibrahim@anfield:~$ cal 2008

Now for a bit of History, try printing the calendar for September 1752:

ibrahim@anfield:~$ cal 9 1752
   September 1752
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
       1  2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Do you notice that there are 11 missing days – September 3 – 13? To know more about the missing days, you can try reading here, here and here.