Xref: utzoo comp.mail.misc:2959 comp.unix.questions:19958 news.newusers.questions:1501 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!srcsip!nic.MR.NET!thor.acc.stolaf.edu!stolaf!towfiq From: towfiq@interlan.Interlan.COM (Mark Towfigh) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc,comp.unix.questions,news.newusers.questions Subject: Re: Controlling Biff Message-ID: Date: 16 Feb 90 16:29:53 GMT References: <1579@husc6.harvard.edu> Sender: news@thor.acc.stolaf.edu Followup-To: comp.mail.misc Organization: Racal InterLan Inc., Boxborough, MA (1-800-LAN-TALK) Lines: 28 In-reply-to: schisto@popvax.harvard.edu's message of 14 Feb 90 12:54:21 GMT In article <1579@husc6.harvard.edu> schisto@popvax.harvard.edu (LTD) writes: I would very much like to control the "biff" command. As i've seen in the 4.3BSD manual and our on-line Ultrix 3.0 manual, i only have the option of turning biff on or off. The control i seek would ideally allow me to set biff to write to screen as much of the incoming message as i would like. If the ideal isn't possible, then perhaps someone knows how to get biff to simply beep with either a simple message saying "you have mail" or no message at all. You would have to modify the program comsat to perform the first action you desire. Biff is just a program which tells comsat if you would like to be informed of incoming mail or not. I would suggest that you do not want to bother doing this, however, because there is another program, sysline, which notifies you of mail in just the way you want: it displays only on the status line of your terminal, and tries to display as much of the message as possible when it arrives. Check out sysline, and seen if that isn't what you want; it doesn't even mess up your screen! You can't run it on a vt100, unfortunately, but if you're running a vt100-clone, like a wyse85, that might have such a capability built-in. -- Mark Towfigh, Racal Interlan, Inc. towfiq@interlan.Interlan.COM W: (508) 263-9929 H: (617) 488-2818 uunet!interlan!towfiq "The Earth is but One Country, and Mankind its Citizens" -- Baha'u'llah