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BIFF(1) BSD General Commands Manual BIFF(1)
NAME
biff -- be notified if mail arrives and who it is from
SYNOPSIS
biff [n | y | b]
DESCRIPTION
The biff 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 ``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 termi-nal terminal
nal whenever mail arrives.
If no arguments are given, biff displays the present notification status of the terminal to the stan-dard standard
dard output.
The biff utility operates asynchronously. For synchronous notification use the MAIL variable of sh(1)
or the mail variable of csh(1).
DIAGNOSTICS
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
csh(1), mail(1), sh(1), comsat(8)
HISTORY
The biff command appeared in 4.0BSD. It was named after the dog of Heidi Stettner. He died in August
1993, at 15.
BSD July 9, 2002 BSD
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