[Remind-Fans] Subject: Newbie problem-Clarification AH HA!

[Pete Carlton]

> Okay, thanks for the link to the man page, it gives a better
> description of the info I got from within remind.
>
> Not to beat a point to death, but I certainly hope that making
> changes directly into a text file is not the recommended way to use
> Remind.
> I was under the impression that items were to be entered directly
> through the terminal.
> The instructions on the article I referenced did not seem to give the
> instructions you gave.
> I was pleasantly surprised when entering: echo "REM 6 January MSG
> David's birthday" >> ~/.reminders  Actually produced a reminder.
> Sadly this is an incredibly inefficient way to add items to remember
> to a list.
> I thought that Remind was pointed directly to the correct file to
> begin with.  Why do I need to tell it where each time?
> If someone can plainly set me straight on using Remind better I would
> appreciate it.

It seems you are laboring under some misconceptions about how a  
terminal works and how the Remind program works.
You can't just type "REM 6 January MSG David's birthday" at a  
Terminal prompt (it seems that's what you did at first, right?).   
(Actually, you couldn't have typed that in verbatim, since there's an  
unmatched single-quote character; your shell would have complained  
about that..but that's beside the point.)

What happens when you type that in is: your shell (the program  
running inside the Terminal window that interprets the things you  
type in) interprets the first word, REM, as a command.  Since Mac OS  
X's filesystem is semi-case-insensitive, it interprets "REM" as the  
'rem' command.  Your shell then interprets the rest of the words on  
the line ("6 January MSG David's birthday" etc) as arguments to the  
'rem' command.  The 'rem' command then passes those arguments to the  
'remind' command.  Since "6 January MSG David's birthday" are not  
valid arguments for remind, the program responds by printing out a  
usage summary.

When you enter (echo "REM 6 January MSG David's birthday" >>  
~/.reminders) into your Terminal, you are not "pointing Remind to the  
correct file" - you are not using Remind at all here.  What you are   
doing is adding a line to a text file.  Remind is then used to  
interpret the contents of that text file.

It is a very good thing that you need to tell Remind where to look -  
this lets you put your reminder files wherever you want, lets you  
have as many reminder files as you want, etc.