biff(1) [osx man page]

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

RCVTTY(1)                                                            [nmh-1.5]                                                           RCVTTY(1)

NAME

       rcvtty  - report new mail

SYNOPSIS

       /usr/lib/mh/rcvtty [command] [-form formatfile] [-format string] [-width columns] [-bell | -nobell] [-newline | -nonewline] [-biff] [-ver-
            sion] [-help]

DESCRIPTION

       The rcvtty can be used to report new mail.  It is used primarily in conjunction with mail filtering agents such as slocal or procmail.

       The rcvtty program executes the named command with the message as its standard input, and writes the resulting output on your terminal.

       Alternately, if no command is specified (or is bogus), then rcvtty will instead write a one-line scan listing.  The default  output  format
       of this scan listing may be overridden by using either the -form formatfile or -format string option, similar to the equivalent options for
       scan and inc.  See mh-format(5) for details.

       A newline is output before the message output, and the terminal bell is rung after the output.  The -nonewline  and  -nobell  options  will
       inhibit these functions.

       The switch -width columns may be given to specify the width of the scan line.  The default is to use the width of the terminal.

       In addition to the standard format escapes described in mh-format(5), rcvtty also recognizes the following additional component escapes:

            Escape    Returns  Description
            body      string   the (compressed) first part of the body
            dtimenow  date     the current date
            folder    string   the name of the current folder

       By default, rcvtty will send its output to every terminal on the local machine that is owned by current user, and that has given write per-
       mission as granted by the command mesg(1).  If the option -biff is given, then rcvtty will obey the notification status set by the  command
       biff(1) instead.

FILES

       /etc/nmh/mts.conf          nmh mts configuration file
       $HOME/.maildelivery        The file controlling local delivery
       /etc/nmh/maildelivery      Rather than the standard file

CONTEXT

       None

DEFAULTS

       `-width' defaults to the width of the terminal
       `-newline'
       `-bell'

SEE ALSO

       rcvdist(1), rcvpack(1), rcvstore(1), mh-format(5), slocal(1)

BUGS

       Only two return codes are meaningful, others should be.

MH.6.8                                                             11 June 2012                                                          RCVTTY(1)