biff —
be notified if mail arrives and who it is from
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).
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.
csh(1),
mail(1),
sh(1),
comsat(8)
The
biff command appeared in
4.0BSD. “Biff” was Heidi Stettner's dog.
He died in August 1993, at 15.
![[OpenBSD]](/openbsd.gif){kind=small}