Hi all,

I use geektool on my Mac to put useful things on my desktop.  (Rainmeter is
the equivalent program for windoze.)
Anyways, I would like have some todo items show up in geektool, but emacs
eats cpu, aquamacs doesn't do --batch stuff well, and I hate wasting cycles.
So I wrote a small perl program that digests every file in my org directory
looking for todos.  It runs blindingly fast compared to emacs, and it does
what I need it to.

I've included the script at the end of this msg, should anyone else find it
interesting.
One should consider changing the values of $orgdir and $re.
And (maybe) the location of perl.
It parses :CATEGORY: properties and prints that out (or the file name if
there's no category) for each task with a keyword matching one in $re.
It's not perfect, I know.  But it does work for me.

Cheers.
Fil

#!/usr/bin/perl

$orgdir = '/Users/fil/Dropbox/org';
$re = 'ACTIVE|REVIEW';

@files = ();
$line = '';
$category = '';

# get files
opendir D, $orgdir;
@files = grep { /\.org$/ } readdir(D);
closedir D;

for my $file (@files) {
  $category = $file;
  $category =~ s/\.org$//;
  open F, "$orgdir/$file";
  while ($line = <F>) {
    if ( $line =~ m/:CATEGORY: *(.+)$/ ) { $category = $1; }
    if ( $line =~ m/^\*+ +($re) +(.+)$/ ) {
      printf "%-13s: %s\n", $category, $2;
    }
  }
  close F;
}


-- 
Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng.
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Ryerson University
350 Victoria St, Toronto, ON
M5B 2K3, Canada
Tel: 416/979-5000 ext 7749
Fax: 416/979-5265
Email: salustri@ryerson.ca
http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil/