03-06-2002
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Join Date: Aug 2001
Last Activity: 26 February 2016, 12:31 PM EST
Location: Ashburn, Virginia
Posts: 9,926
Thanks Given: 63
Thanked 461 Times in 270 Posts
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.