NAME
biff —
be notified if mail arrives and who it
is from
SYNOPSIS
biff |
[n | y] |
DESCRIPTION
biff informs the system whether you want
to be notified when mail arrives during the current terminal session.
The options are as follows:
n- Disables notification.
y- Enables notification.
When mail notification is enabled, the header and first few lines
of the message will be printed on your screen whenever mail arrives. A
“biff y” command is often included in
the file .login or .profile
to be executed at each login.
biff operates asynchronously. For
synchronous notification use the MAIL variable of
sh(1)
or the mail variable of
csh(1).
EXIT STATUS
The biff utility exits with one of the
following values:
- 0
- Notification was enabled at the time of invocation.
- 1
- Notification was disabled at the time of invocation.
- >1
- An error occurred.
SEE ALSO
HISTORY
The biff command appeared in
4.0BSD. "Biff" was Heidi Stettner's dog.
He died in August 1993, at 15.