ID Sequences

Some task commands require an ID to be specified. For example:

% task 3 done

This marks a single task as done. But if you wanted to mark several tasks as done, you could use:

% task 3,4,5 done

Which would mark tasks 3, 4 and 5 as all done. In this example, the three IDs are consecutive, which means you could also have entered:

% task 3-5 done

Or in a more complex example:

% task 1,3-5,12 23-25 done

This would mark tasks 1, 3, 4, 5, 12, 23, 24 and 25 as done. Note that this example uses two sequences, separated by a space.

You must be careful though. Task tries very carefully to do the right thing when it interprets the command line, but must still impose some rules so that it can unambiguously read the command. If you use one or more sequences, then they must appear on the command line adjacent to each other. If they are separated by something else, then task assumes the second and subsequent set is not a sequence. Here is an example of this:

% task 3 Order part number 4-123

Clearly the 4-123 is a part number, and not a sequence. Task is being asked to modify the description of task 3 to be "Order part number 4-123". Note that the ID is separated from the part number by something other than a sequence. Here is a bad example that task will misinterpret:

% task 3 4-123 is back-ordered, try again next week

The intent here is that task 3 have its description modified to be "40123 is back-ordered, try again next week", but will be misinterpreted as tasks 3, 4, 5, 6 ... 123 will all be modified to have the description "is back-ordered, try again next week". The solution is to quote the whole description:

% task 3 "4-123 is back-ordered, try again next week"