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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 \007) will be printed on your termi-nal terminal
     nal whenever mail arrives.

     If no arguments are given, biff displays the present notification status of the terminal to the stan-dard standard
     dard 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