[ale] Linux shell process

[Jim Butler]

Hi everyone.
I need someone to help shed some light on a question I have.
This morning I had a job interview for a Linux admin position, and I 
thought I'd done a pretty good job of preparing myself for the drill of 
questions, and I thought my experience would be strong enough in the 
areas of Linux that I am familiar with but apparently not. Here is the 
question they put to me, and I would like to hear a variety of answers:

Suppose you have a list of 10 birthdays for 10 different friends, and 
you wanted to create a task from within a bash shell environment that 
would alert you as to when each friend's birthday came around. How would 
you do it?

The first part of the question is obvious. Since it's a time/date 
related question, I automatically assumed cron would be part of the 
solution. That wasn't the part of the solution they were looking for. In 
proceeding with the question they told me to forget cron because we 
already know that cron is a part of the process. I mentioned about 
running the date command and piping output through some kind of if/then 
structure in a script that would match the date against a user's 
birthday and if it matched, then to print out a message saying that it's 
that person's birthday. That wasn't exactly what they were looking for 
either. I suppose there must be a shell command somewhere for setting up 
alarms like an alarm clock, but I don't know if that is what they were 
looking for either.

In any case, it's probably an obvious question to someone, and it's a 
little embarrassing that I missed it, but I always like to learn from my 
experiences. Please think about the question and let me know how you 
would solve this.

-Jim Butler