NAME
biff —
be notified if mail arrives and
who it is from
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
biff informs the system whether you want to be notified when
mail arrives during the current terminal session.
Options supported by
biff:
-
-
- n
- Disables notification.
-
-
- y
- Enables notification.
When mail notification is enabled, the header and first few lines of the message
will be printed on your screen whenever mail arrives. A
“
biff y
” command is often included in the
file
.login or
.profile to be executed at
each login.
When no arguments are present,
biff displays the current
notification status to the standard output.
biff 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 was enabled at the time of invocation.
-
-
- 1
- Notification was disabled at the time of invocation.
-
-
- >1
- An error occurred.
SEE ALSO
csh(1),
from(1),
mail(1),
sh(1),
comsat(8)
HISTORY
The
biff command appeared in
4.0BSD.