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

[David Engel]

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> > how do you keep your .reminders file clean: how do you remove expired one-time reminders from the file? ... is there a mechanism for that in remind or do you have to do it manually?

> You have to do it manually.  Ancient (2.x) versions of Remind had an option to purge expired reminders.  However, with 3.x and Remind's expression mechanism, there is in general no way for Remind to know for sure that a reminder has expired and will never reappear.

I don't have a real good way of automating the purging or archiving of
expired messages, but I have found a way for myself to simplify the
manual process.  When I add one-time-only events - to a separate file
as Paul recommends - I always put them in as `REM yyyy mmm dd ... MSG
...`. Then I can use `sort -k3 -M` to sort the file and simplify the
process of cleaning.  If you are using the order the entries are put
in to weakly keep track of when something was entered, sorting does
not help, but that's why I really like remind - it's flexible.

I haven't worked it out, but I think it would not be terrible
difficult to script something using sort, grep, diff, etc., to find
lines that match the prior month without UNTIL lines and move those -
either to archive or /dev/null - while leaving the rest of the file. I
don't normally use a very complicated remind script for one-time
events, so I think the INCLUDE in the main .reminders helps simplify
this process.

David Engel