My memory is worthless, so I use lots of memory aids. One of them, Jan Schaumann’s bday, is a birthday reminder that emails me when my friends’ birthdays are coming up.

Here are a few tips for using bday.

bday and bdayd, the reminder daemon, are somewhat inconsistent about where they assume Perl is installed. If you get Command not found errors when running bday or bdayd, make sure that their first lines point to your Perl installation, most likely /usr/bin/perl.

Also, bday doesn’t validate its user settings very well. If you see this error:

Argument "" isn't numeric in addition (+) at
/usr/local/bin/bdayd line 96, <PEOPLE> line 1.

then bday has a blank for the number of days in advance you’d like to be notified of birthdays. Just run bday again, change your user preferences, and be sure to enter a valid number.