[Remind-Fans] how to keep .reminders file clean?

[David F. Skoll]

Daniel A Graham wrote:

> Running remind with the -n switch and an arbitrary date gives a list of 
> the next occurrence of all reminders that occur or repeat after the 
> given date. If it were possible to add the -l switch to get the 
> associated file and line number information then it would be possible, 
> by elimination, to get a list of the file and line numbers of reminders 
> that do not occur or repeat after the given date.

Not really.  Here is an admittedly contrived example:

    SET code shell("some-magic-shell-command")
    REM [code] MSG When does this expire??

As you see, in general, it's impossible for Remind to prove to itself
that a reminder will never again be triggered.  However, a partial
solution is probably useful to many: If a reminder does not contain
any expression-substitutions, then we can know if it will never repeat.
So these examples are candidates for pruning:

   REM 1 Jan 2008 MSG Easy to see this has expired
   REM Tue UNTIL 15 Jan 2008 MSG Ditto
   REM 2007 MSG 2007 is over, so expire this!

whereas these are not:

   REM [a] Jan 2007 MSG Be conservative, unfortunately...
   REM Mon SATISFY some_horrible_expression MSG Too complicated

   IFTRIG 5 Jan 2008
   	  # All of these lines *could* be eliminated...
	  # But I'm not sure it's worth handling this case.
   ENDIF

Since I suspect most people don't do anything very fancy for non-repeating
reminders, the partial solution is probably good enough.

Also, spitting out file names and line numbers is tricky in the face
of backslash-continutation... it's probably better to have Remind itself
suppress expired reminders since it knows how to parse them already.
A simple script could then diff the original file and the pruned file
and figure out what lines to archive.

Regards,

David.