Time
to
leave!
The message flashes across your screen, the terminal bell rings.
You keep working.
You're
going
to
be
late!
Another message, a minute later.
Sheesh.
Did your mother learn to use
write (1.33),
or what?
No.
It's the leave program that you started to remind you of a meeting.
(A little while ago, it already told you that You
have
to
leave
in
5
minutes
.)
If your system has leave, you can start it in one of three ways:
leave 1300
sets the alarm for 1:00 p.m.
leave +30
sets the alarm for 30 minutes from now.
With no arguments, leave
prompts you When
do
you
have
to
leave?
You can type an answer like 1300
or +30
above.
Or, if you just press
RETURN,
leave will leave you alone.
That's handy to put in your
.login or .profile (2.2)
file.
When will it stop nagging you?
When you log out, leave stops automatically.
Also, newer versions of leave will quit after ten minutes, saying
That
was
the
last
time
I'll
tell
you.
Bye.
Older versions keep on forever.
On some versions of leave, you can't set an alarm for any time tomorrow (past midnight). But you can use sleep (40.2) to start the leave past midnight. For example, maybe it's 10 p.m. now and you want to leave at 1 a.m. Midnight is two hours or 7200 seconds (60 x 60 x 2) from now. Add a fudge factor of 10 minutes (600 seconds) and type:
( ) |
$ |
---|
You can also kill leave-though you have to use the "sure kill," signal 9 (38.8). To see leave lurking in the background and get its PID (38.3), you usually need the ps (38.5) -x option. Piping through grep leave will shorten the ps output:
%ps x | grep leave
6914 p3 S 0:00 leave 19283 p3 R 0:01 grep leave %kill -9 6914
-