UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Good day to all.

What can be a good alternative if we want to somehow make an xterm window pop-up to give a simple warning message like "This equipment is due for calibration." This event will be triggered by checking the machine's date and compares that with a simple date list to give out the warning at the correct date. Can anyone give alternate solutions? (like trigger the netscape browser, or use an xterm window) I really need your thinking caps here guys....

What about running a shell-script from cron? At a given time (every hour, twice a day, at noon every day, etc...) check to see if today's date is in your list of dates. Or it could check to see if it was, say 60 days from the last time it was run. The program would leave a flag file containing the last date it was run successfully to compare against... There are thousands of ways to determine if it should run... the at utility, a scheduler app (like a meeting reminder), etc...

Then it's just a matter of displaying it...
You could use wall, an xterm pop-up, use the dialog utility, a wish pop-up...

Once you figure out exactly how you want to do it, it would then be easier to execute... Are you guys using X-Windows? Terminal? Would it be better to send out an e-mail on those certain days?

The best course of action would be to figure out the means by which you want to have this happen, and then start mapping out how it should work. Maybe I work backwards here, but that's what I would do...