biff

biff [y | n]

biff is a mail notification utility that informs you at the command line when new mail arrives during your terminal session. When enabled, it displays the sender, subject, and the first few lines of incoming messages along with a terminal beep.The notification works asynchronously through the comsat(8) service. If comsat is not enabled on the system, biff will have no effect. For synchronous notification, use the MAIL variable in sh(1) or the mail variable in csh(1) instead.A common practice is to include biff y in ~/.login or ~/.profile to enable notifications at each login.

y

Enable mail notification for the current terminal

Disable mail notification for the current terminal

The biff command requires the comsat(8) daemon to be running on the system. Without it, mail notifications will not work.Using su(1) can cause permission issues with biff due to terminal ownership remaining with the original user, resulting in "Permission denied" errors when changing notification status.

The command appeared in 4.0BSD (released 1980), written by John Foderaro at the University of California, Berkeley. It is named after Biff, a dog belonging to fellow Berkeley student Heidi Stettner. The popular story that Biff barked at the mail carrier is disputed by Stettner herself, but the name stuck as a fitting choice for a mail notification utility.On modern systems the notification daemon is part of GNU inetutils (as in.comsat), and the biff client typically ships in a dedicated biff package on Debian and Ubuntu.

mail(1), sh(1), csh(1)

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