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 07) 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).

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