Sounds like he won't make that mistake again. This is as good an example of why people should RTFM as any. I'm sympathetic to the notion that cal(1) behaved co

Sounds like he won't make that mistake again. This is as good an example of why people should RTFM as any. I'm sympathetic to the notion that cal(1) behaved counterintuitively, but at the same time, there's no obvious right answer here. Different people have different ideas of what is obvious. I think '08' is obviously an octal number, but that notion isn't necessarily shared by everyone. The take-away here is to read the docs, run the program, ensure the output is what you expect, then move on.