History on BSD based systems (including Mac OS X)

9 Oct 2003

Spotted this on some web page. If on a BSD based system, such as Mac OS X and FreeBSD (the only ones I’ve tried it on), you go to the console and enter the following command:

cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.* | grep date "+%m/%d"

You get a list of stuff that happened on that particular day, such as for today we see:

10/09   First two-way telephone conversation, 1876
10/09   Independence Day in Uganda
10/09   Independence of Guayaquil in Ecuador
10/09   Korean Alphabet Day in South Korea
10/09   Leif Erikson Day commemorates the discovery of North America in AD 1000
10/09   Republic Day in Khmer Republic
10/09   John Lennon born in Liverpool, England, 1940