cal is a nice utility that displays calendar in terminal, but there is a small problem that needs to be fixed as it uses Sunday as the start of the week.
cal is a link to ncal utility.
$ ls -l $(which cal) lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Jun 11 2012 /usr/bin/cal -> ncal
It is a part of the bsdmainutils package.
$ dpkg-query -S ncal bsdmainutils: /usr/share/man/man1/ncal.1.gz bsdmainutils: /usr/bin/ncal bash-completion: /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/ncal
It uses Sunday as the start of the week.
$ cal
April 2018
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30
cal does not support -M flag to use Monday as the start of the week, but ncal does support it.
$ cal -M
Usage: cal [general options] [-hjy] [[month] year]
cal [general options] [-hj] [-m month] [year]
ncal [general options] [-bhJjpwySM] [-s country_code] [[month] year]
ncal [general options] [-bhJeoSM] [year]
General options: [-NC31] [-A months] [-B months]
For debug the highlighting: [-H yyyy-mm-dd] [-d yyyy-mm]
$ ncal -M
April 2018
Mo 2 9 16 23 30
Tu 3 10 17 24
We 4 11 18 25
Th 5 12 19 26
Fr 6 13 20 27
Sa 7 14 21 28
Su 1 8 15 22 29
You can use the old-style ncal output to display calendar with Monday as the start of the week.
$ ncal -M -b
April 2018
Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30
Create an alias to solve this problem permanently.
$ echo 'alias cal="ncal -M -b"' | tee -a ~/.bashrc alias cal="ncal -M -b"
$ source ~/.bashrc
$ cal
April 2018
Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30
$ cal 08 2019
August 2019
Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31
