UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello all,
I want a substitute for
biff n.
On my HP-UX i don't have biff.i got a substitute for biff (newmail).but don't know how to set biff n.pls help.
thanks in advance,
shilpa

you are saying that you dont have biff installed in your system. Ok. but you did mentioned that how to configure in your system, (after you setup biff) to make biff on and available, add this to your .login file: biff y
to make it invisible and not active, use this command instead: biff n hope this helps.

sorry for confusing....
we are porting a well developed software from Compaq to HP. In one script i found biff n.but when i run the script on HP it is showing biff:not found. there is no manual help for biff for HP.So i searched for a command by which i can replace biff n. i got a command which is quite similar,(newmail),but there is no option which can replace 'n' option there...pls help.
thank you,
shilpa

Upon reading the manpage, the newmail command has to be invoked to begin to function. If you don't start it, it will not run...

Anyone else have insight?

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.

Thnaks for the reply.
If some person has set the option for notification using newmail,how can I disable the option. Please note that notify is also not installed on my system.