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Full Discussion: biff
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers biff Post 16722 by Perderabo on Wednesday 6th of March 2002 08:07:30 AM
Old 03-06-2002
I never worked on a compaq, but on BSD, where biff was born, all biff did was turn on or off the user execute bit on the tty file of the controlling terminal. A "biff n" made sense because a previous user might have done a "biff y" on the same terminal and left it that way.

On HP-UX, there is no way for a previous user to have run "biff y". And even if the previous user did a "chmod u+x `tty`" for some odd reason, who cares? There is no comsat daemon on HP-UX who is scanning the tty files looking for execute bits.

So people who want asyncronous notification of email on a tty session will need to use newmail. People who don't want asyncronous notification of email on a tty session should do nothing.
 

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LEARN ABOUT SUNOS

biff

biff(1B)					     SunOS/BSD Compatibility Package Commands						  biff(1B)

NAME

       biff - give notice of incoming mail messages

SYNOPSIS

       /usr/ucb/biff [y | n]

DESCRIPTION

       biff  turns  mail notification on or off for the terminal session. With no arguments, biff displays the current notification status for the
       terminal.

       If notification is allowed, the terminal rings the bell and displays the header and the first few lines of each arriving mail message. biff
       operates asynchronously. For synchronized notices, use the MAIL variable of sh(1) or the mail variable of csh(1).

       A `biff y' command can be included in your ~/.login or ~/.profile file for execution when you log in.

OPTIONS

       y	       Allow mail notification for the terminal.

       n	       Disable notification for the terminal.

FILES

       ~/.login 	       User's login file

       ~/.profile	       User's profile file

ATTRIBUTES

       See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |      ATTRIBUTE TYPE	     |	    ATTRIBUTE VALUE	   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |Availability		     |SUNWscpu			   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+

SEE ALSO

       csh(1), mail(1), sh(1), attributes(5)

SunOS 5.10							    14 Sep 1992 							  biff(1B)
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