Command Line Hebrew Calander: hdate, hcal and libhdate. Advanced

[ihyfr]

What It Is

libhdate is a Hebrew calendar library which comes with two bonus programs, hdate and hcal. hdate is the Hebrew equivalent to date and hcal to cal. It is not in the official repositories so manual building and installation is unavoidable.

The 1rst command in the image is hdate. It simply displays the Gregorian date and the Hebrew date. The output is set to Hebrew but the default is English.

The 2nd command is hdate -t. The -t argument causes all the relevant times for the day to be displayed.

The 3rd command is hcal. This displays a calendar. I set mine to also display each weeks candle lighting and havdala times and each weeks parsha.

How to Install and Configure.

1. Get the package from http://libhdate.sourceforge.net/ or possibly more directly from https://sourceforge.net/projects/libhdate/files/latest/download

2. Unpack the tar ball. If your not sure how to do that. Open your terminal. Go to the directory where you downloaded to. Enter

Code: [Select]

$tar xf libhdate-1.6.01.tar.bz2 If that doesn't work, check the name of the file you downloaded. If it is not libhdate-1.6.01.tar.bz2, enter

Code: [Select]

$tar xf yourPackageName
3. Install, step 2 should have output a directory with a name similar to the name of the package you downloaded. Inside is a file INSTALL. It is a text file with the installation instructions. If you find it confusing, try reading this post by Bald Brick http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,86993.msg724233.html#msg724233

4. Configuration. hdate and hcal have configuration files in ~/.config/hdate/hdaterc and ~/.config/hcal/hcalrc. Documentation is included in the config file. The only part that was confusing was timezones. It takes an integer value of your UTC time offset. Here is mine in Seattle, UTC-8.

Code: [Select]

# TIMEZONE may may be in decimal format or in the form degrees[:minutes]
TIMEZONE=-8