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BIFF(1) General Commands Manual BIFF(1) 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. Options supported by biff: 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. When no arguments are present, biff displays the current notification status to the standard output. 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 csh(1), from(1), mail(1), sh(1), comsat(8) HISTORY The biff command appeared in 4.0BSD. NetBSD 10.99 December 20, 2016 NetBSD 10.99