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Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

"cal -3" is quite useful, I use it all the time. To show the week-of-year use "ncal -w". Add "-S" if you want ncal to start weeks on Sunday (crazy!).

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Use `cal -m` if you want a week to start on a Monday. AFAIK Sunday is the (US centric) default.

`cal` does try to use the expected first day of the week based on the locale. It seems to at least use LC_TIME from some quick local testing:

  bratch@serenity ~ $ LC_TIME=en_GB cal | head -n2
        May 2017      
  Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
  
  bratch@serenity ~ $ LC_TIME=en_US cal | head -n2
        May 2017      
  Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa

Why crazy?

A large proportion (if not the majority) of the world starts their calanders on Monday. While the ordering is arbitrary, I always thought of the weekend as a single block of days so it's odd to say that the week ends in the middle of the weekend (rather than at the end of the weekend).

I always saw "weekend" in the same way as "book end", that is, that one is at the beginning of the week (one starting end), and one is at the conclusion of the week (the finishing end). Because our weeks come successively, the end of one is immediately followed by the beginning of the next, hence the "block" called the "weekend".

I'd never thought of it that way. I still think it's odd because book ends aren't made of chapters of a book (and weekends are days like any other).

All-in-all it's arbitrary anyway. :P https://xkcd.com/1073/

Bookends usually come in pairs.

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