NAME
biff —
be notified if mail arrives and who it
is from
SYNOPSIS
biff |
[n | y |
b] |
DESCRIPTION
Thebiff utility informs the system whether you want to
be notified on your terminal when mail arrives.
Affected is the first terminal associated with the standard input,
standard output or standard error file descriptor, in that order. Thus, it
is possible to use the redirection facilities of a shell to toggle the
notification for other terminals than the one biff
runs on.
The following options are available:
n- Disable notification.
y- Enable header notification.
b- Enable bell notification.
When header notification is enabled, the header and first few lines of the message will be printed on your terminal whenever mail arrives. A “Li biff y” command is often included in the file .login or .profile to be executed at each login.
When bell notification is enabled, only two bell characters (ASCII \007) will be printed on your terminal whenever mail arrives.
If no arguments are given, biff displays
the present notification status of the terminal to the standard output.
The biff utility operates asynchronously.
For synchronous notification use the MAIL variable
of sh(1) or the mail variable of
csh(1).
EXIT STATUS
The biff utility exits with one of the
following values:
- 0
- Notification is enabled.
- 1
- Notification is disabled.
- >1
- An error occurred.
COMPATIBILITY
Previous versions of the biff utility
affected the terminal attached to standard error without first trying the
standard input or output devices.
SEE ALSO
HISTORY
The biff command appeared in
4.0BSD. It was named after the dog of Heidi
Stettner. He died in August 1993, at 15.