cal command - start monday

I was wondering - is there a way to make 'cal' (a terminal program) start the week on monday?

Usually it can be done with the -m flag, but this does not have any effect on the Mac. AFAIK, for freebsd you need deskutils, but I could not find any equivalent on the mac, even in homebrew.

Is there a switch or alternate source for a cal tool that allows weekday start changes?

Solution 1:

GNU cal has a --starting-day option:

$ brew install gcal
$ alias cal='gcal --starting-day=1'
$ cal

      June 2013
 Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
                 1  2
  3  4  5  6  7  8  9
 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

ncal also starts weeks on mondays by default:

$ ncal
    June 2013
Mo     3 10 17 24
Tu     4 11 18 25
We     5 12 19 26
Th     6 13 20 27
Fr     7 14 21 28
Sa  1  8 15 22 29
Su  2  9 16 23 30

Solution 2:

This Macworld.com OS X Hint shows some scripting to put Monday first…

cal | awk '{ print " "$0; getline; print " Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su"; \
getline; if (substr($0,1,2) == " 1") print "                    1 "; \
do { prevline=$0; if (getline == 0) exit; print " " \
substr(prevline,4,17) " " substr($0,1,2) " "; } while (1) }'

Result:

      June 2013
 Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
                 1  2 
  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 
 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 
 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 
 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 

Solution 3:

$ man cal says: "The cal utility displays a simple calendar in traditional format and ncal offers an alternative layout, more options and the date of easter. The new format is a little cramped but it makes a year fit on a 25x80 terminal. If arguments are not specified, the current month is displayed". To me, it seems preferable to use ncal as opposed to implementing an ugly hack.