The nextbus program prints the next few outbound bus times of the day for the routes you specify. Up to 3 bus times are shown for each route. Fewer will be shown if there are fewer than 3 buses still to pass today. (For the purposes of PAT, a "day" goes from 3am to 2:59am. However, if you ask for a time after midnight, and there are no further buses scheduled on a route, the program will print out the first 3 buses of the next day, if any.) The times listed are generally from Forbes & Craft in Oakland, since that is the last published timepoint before CMU. You may want to fudge the figures a bit to reflect the time from Oakland to CMU, as well as the average delays of buses at the time you're riding. A simple use of the program: nextbus 61c if run at 8:35 pm on a Wednesday would output 61c: 8:45 9:15 9:45 Some times will have letters after them, indicating a slight change in the route. If present, these letters will be explained in subsequent lines. For instance, "nextbus 61c" run at 3:30 pm on a weekday would output 61c: 3:41L 3:44 3:54L L: Trip runs as far as Murray and Hazelwood (in Greenfield) You can ask for more than one bus route if you like. For instance, you may be able to take either a 61a or a 61b bus home. In that case, you'd just type nextbus 61a 61b and the program (if, say, run at 8:35 on Wednesday) might output 61a: 9:13 9:53 10:33 61b: 8:43 9:33 10:13 Often you may want to use a different time from the present for looking at the schedule. For instance, since buses take a while to get from Oakland to CMU, and buses can run late at certain hours of the day, you may wish to see the scheduled times starting from 10 minutes ago. To do this, you'd just type: nextbus 61c -10 Likewise, if you're planning to hack for an hour, and then try to catch a bus, you might want to type: nextbus 61c +60 [the '+' is required here] You can also specify an absolute time in the near future. For instance, if you'd like to catch the first bus after 9:30, just type nextbus 61c 9:30 (nextbus resolves date and am/pm ambiguities by assuming you mean the first 9:30 following the present time. nextbus uses a 12-hour clock for input and output.) If you want to specify an hour on the hour (like 6:00), you can just type nextbus 61c 6 nextbus has schedules for all the buses which stop by CMU. These are 61a, 61b, 61c, 67a, 67c, 67e, 67f, and 67j. nextbus also has the schedule for the 56u, a bus which leaves from Schenley Plaza and serves Greenfield. Alternatively, you can have nextbus read from a schedule of your own, by using the -f option. Nextbus will look in this file first for buses you specify. If it doesn't find a schedule there, it will try the default files. If your schedule file is "from-myhouse" you could just issue a command like nextbus -f from-myhouse 61a (Note that you still have to specify a route number, even if your schedule contains only one route listing.) The file sched-format, in this directory, tells you how you should format your schedule so that nextbus can read it properly. One special schedule that Squirrel Hill residents might find useful is 61-murray, which lists *inbound* 61C times from Murray Avenue at Hazelwood. To read that, you'd say nextbus -f /afs/cs/user/spok/bus/schedules/61-murray 61c (To shorten this, just put a copy or a link to the file in your own directory.) The schedules discussed above are in /afs/cs/user/spok/bus/schedules. I have recently put a wrapper around this program to serve up the Oakland bus times over the Web, using Mosaic or a similar reader. Try jumping to http://www-cgi.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/bus. You'll get the next bus times for all the outbound buses that go past CMU. Send corrections, bug reports, and comments to ockerbloom@cs.cmu.edu.